Guys, Which Operating System is better? Windows 7 V/s Apple's Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard

Guys, Which Operating System is better? Windows 7 V/s Apple's Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard

Microsoft, burned by the compatibility issues that bedeviled Vista, strove to make compatibility with Vista-level hardware and software a centerpiece of Windows 7, and so didn't dramatically change the under-the-hood plumbing in Windows 7.

Apple, on the other hand, focused its efforts largely on internal plumbing, and many of those efforts won't pay off immediately for users. OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch are new technologies designed to better take advantage of multi-core CPUs and to offload more graphics and animation processing to graphics cards.

The taskbar displays the number of windows open in an application because it shows a stack of icons -- the Dock has no visual clues like that. In addition, when you scroll through each thumbnail in Windows 7, you see a full preview of the window on your desktop, making it easier to determine which window you want to switch to. The Dock doesn't do this. The Dock's implementation of thumbnails is also incomplete. In Snow Leopard, if you run a browser such as Safari or Firefox and then hold down its icon in the Dock, you won't be able to see all open tabs as separate thumbnails; instead you see only a single tab, and have no idea what other tabs are open.

Network

Windows 7's Control Panel is far more complex. It has seven major categories and many subcategories, using a very confusing hierarchy. In Windows 7, to get that information you have to dig deep through numerous applets and menus, and once you do it, it's not easy to remember how to do it again.

Snow Leopard's Network System Preferences compared to the Windows 7's Network and Internet category in its Control Panel. In Snow Leopard, it's exceedingly easy to get at important network information such as TCP/IP and DNS configuration.

The Winner: Windows 7. Many people might consider this a toss-up, but this choice reflects my predilection for tweaking and customizing.

Software compatibility

When it comes to compatibility with existing third-party applications for the Mac, Snow Leopard has some problems.

As for Windows 7, Microsoft seems to have learned the lessons of Windows Vista. There's also a Windows XP mode that allows applications written for XP to run on Windows 7 and look as if they were running on it natively.

The Winner: Windows 7. That's for now, though. In relatively short order, Snow Leopard may have its compatibility problems worked out.

Hardware compatibility

Snow Leopard requires Intel-based hardware; in other words, it won't run on PowerPC G4 or G5-based systems. This means if you've got an Apple machine built before 2006 (when Intel processors were introduced to Macs), you're out of luck.

With Windows 7, things get a bit more complicated. It is designed to run on any machine that runs Windows Vista, which was released in January 2007. But it will also run on many machines originally designed for Windows XP -- in fact, on a Dell Inspiron E1505 too.

The Winner: Windows 7. Windows 7 will work with a wider variety of hardware for which Windows was designed than Snow Leopard will work with Macs.

Ease of use and elegance

Apple controls the hardware as well as the software, the integration between machine and software is unparalleled. Windows users have become used to strange behavior and odd error messages that appear from time to time -- it's the background radiation of Windows. To a certain extent, there's no way around it.

Windows has to work with countless different combinations of CPUs, RAM, hard disks, video cards and other main system hardware. Because of that, these kinds of problems are almost inevitable with Windows-based hardware.

The Winner: Snow Leopard. No one beats Apple when it comes to design. As with previous versions of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard is flat-out beautiful. Windows may be improving, but it still has a way to go if it wants to catch the Mac.

Extras

Snow Leopard is more than just an operating system -- it comes with a full suite of applications, notably iLife with iMovie for making movies, GarageBand for recording and editing music, iWeb for making Web pages and more. There's also the excellent Time Machine backup and restore utility, QuickTime X for capturing movies, and the PDF reader and utility Preview.

By way of contrast, Microsoft has made the decision in Windows 7 to strip out many of the extras in Windows. For example, Windows Movie Maker and Windows and Windows Mail -- both very good programs -- shipped with Windows Vista, but will not ship with Windows 7.

The Winner: Snow Leopard. There's no real competition here; it wins hands down.