Khal Weir

I’ve recently installed two new operating systems on my Macbook Pro and thought I’d write a quick comparison of them. I’m predominantly a Mac user and no longer own a PC, yet I need Windows for testing (damn you IE!) and gaming (damn you Left 4 Dead!). Windows 7 Installing the Release Candidate of Windows 7 was quick, easy and a lot prettier than installing previous versions of Windows. To my surprise, everything worked out of the box except sound and 3D graphics but a popping in the Leopard DVD and visiting the Nvidia site soon fixed that. Only 3GB out of my 4GB of Ram is detected, as I’m using the 32bit version (32bit Leopard and Ubuntu don’t seem to have that problem.. )

Like many, I skipped Vista completely, so I’m not sure whats new for this version and what is brought over from Vista. Things I’ve liked so far are the new window management tricks, like Aero shake and full screening an app by pulling it to the top of the screen; things I’ve not liked are the confusing control panel, my NAS being detected as a media device and struggling to use it as networked drive and being nagged constantly (I’ve since managed to turn this off). There’s been improvements in the Start menu too, and the Spotlight like search works well. Overall, Windows 7 feels snappy and is visually quite appealing (although Microsoft really needs to get together and make their UI’s consistent). The price is right and now that XP is almost a decade old, I think I’ll be buying a copy when it is released. Snow Leopard This release isn’t a huge update from the previous one and this is reflected by its name and very reasonable price. The installation process was as simple, but did take a while. After a reboot nothing looked different at first, but immediately I noticed my system was faster. Safari especially seems faster than ever and start up and shut down speeds are noticeably quicker too. Snow has a bunch of tweaks and nice new features it can automagically set your timezone based on your location based on your WiFi connection. The largest change is ‘behind the scenes’ the move to 64bit and Open CL, allowing OSX to take full advantage of modern hardware and ditching support for legacy machines, this also means you gain some hard drive space back.

The only issue I’ve had so far is my older version of Parallels isn’t compatible with Snow Leopard, this was quite annoying but its good software and the manufacturer dropped the upgrade price for Snow Leopard users. While updating to Snow isn’t like moving from XP to Windows 7 (in fact there’s been some criticism calling it a service pack ) but for £25 (or £39 for a 5 user family license) Snow Leopard is a bargain; for the performance increase I’ve seen alone, I’d recommend it for any Intel Mac owners.