Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7

[EmperorDarius]

You assert that Vista is less stable and secure than both XP and the Windows 7 beta, so surely you should be able to back that up. Or are you just blowing smoke?

No, not less secure, but less stable.
How am I supposed to back it up? Should I make a video of the three systems doing stuff or what? Or maybe get some random quote by some random guy from the internet/magazine/blog?

You can't prove these kind of things that way, you have to try by yourself by using them for a considerable amount of time.

 

[MAG.]

No, not less secure, but less stable.
How am I supposed to back it up? Should I make a video of the three systems doing stuff or what? Or maybe get some random quote by some random guy from the internet/magazine/blog?

You can't prove these kind of things that way, you have to try by yourself by using them for a considerable amount of time.

Weird... I've never had a single crash on Vista. I have it on my M1730 and M17 with no problems at all. Same thing goes to Leopard on my Macs. They both work well for me.

 

[EmperorDarius]

Weird... I've never had a single crash on Vista. I have it on my M1730 and M17 with no problems at all. Same thing goes to Leopard on my Macs. They both work well for me.

Try installing/uninstalling a lot of programs, doing a lot of work with a lot of programs, perhaps some basic multitasking and you'll see how 'stable' it is.

 

[Infrared]

Snow Leopard is a different beast. A lot of people haven't thought about it, but processors of the future will have tens then hundreds of cores (according to Intel). Snow Leopard is about getting ready for this huge change that has already started (most computers now have two cores, and bigger computers sometimes have eight cores). It takes years for programmers (especially the likes of Adobe and other big names) to adapt their programs to take advantage of these OS hooks.

But will Adobe will use them at all? There's lot of frameworks and so
on they could have used in the past. They didn't.

As far as possible they will want to maintain a common OS-neutral
codebase. Anything that means substantial rewriting for their OS X
versions alone simply isn't going to happen.

 

[Infrared]

Ehm, sure, but OS 10.0 was a completely new OS, that really was like a BETA.

Ever heard of this? --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

That's what Apple had to buy in because they were incapable
of writing their own OS. OS 10.0 wasn't a completely new OS.
It was derived from that (with substantial changes, of course).

 

[EmperorDarius]

Ever heard of this? --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

That's what Apple had to buy in because they were incapable
of writing their own OS. OS 10.0 wasn't a completely new OS.
It was derived from that (with substantial changes, of course).

It was still Steve Jobs' creation, wasn't it?
Anyway, it was still they're first try at a new version of their OS, and doesn't change the fact that nowadays OS X is much more stable.

 

[FX120]

Try installing/uninstalling a lot of programs, doing a lot of work with a lot of programs, perhaps some basic multitasking and you'll see how 'stable' it is.

Please. My main workstation has a current uptime of 49 days and 23 hours, running Vista Buisiness.

Sorry for the sucky widget, it doesn't do the greatest job, but you get the point.

Last reboot was from updates, I've never had a complete system crash in the two years I've been using it.

 

[Infrared]

It was still Steve Jobs' creation, wasn't it?

If you mean he wrote it, no.

If you mean he brought in people to hack together existing and new code, yes.

Anyway, it was still they're first try at a new version of their OS [...]

No, it wasn't their first try.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)

 

[EmperorDarius]

Please. My main workstation has a current uptime of 49 days and 23 hours, running Vista Buisiness.

Sorry for the sucky widget, it doesn't do the greatest job, but you get the point.

Last reboot was from updates, I've never had a complete system crash in the two years I've been using it.

So what? I would do the things i mentioned before on the first day of use, time doesn't really prove anything.

No, it wasn't their first try.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)

Oh, does it really matter? It was the first Mac OS 10 version, so of course it'd be buggy. And we're talking about a 2001 OS versus a 2007 OS. So it'd be better to compare Tiger/Leopard to Vista, which are much more stable.

 

[Infrared]

Last reboot was from updates, I've never had a complete system crash in the two years I've been using it.

Vista is pretty stable. It can even gracefully recover from a graphics driver
crash, something which neither XP nor OS X can do.

 

[MAG.]

Try installing/uninstalling a lot of programs, doing a lot of work with a lot of programs, perhaps some basic multitasking and you'll see how 'stable' it is.

I do all the heavy tasking on these systems. I am currently using around 3GB of RAM on my Dell XPS m1730 (total 8). You should see how my desktop looks now I currently have around 30 Firefox tabs open, 10 in Chrome, iTunes, Hammer (Source SDK), Steam and Left 4 Dead (minimized, but I keep it running), and there is no sign of lag/slow down/crash. It's simply very stable. BTW, I only reinstalled Vista when I got my laptop from Dell (to remove all the bloatware), it's been a year and 3 months, and I haven't had to reinstall it again so far.

 

[FX120]

So what? I would do the things i mentioned before on the first day of use, time doesn't really prove anything.

Except that I do all of those things on a daily basis, and have done so for the last two years, and my system is still stable. Seems contrary to your statements that it would be unstable, crash prone, and slow, which it is none of.

 

[Stridder44]

Try installing/uninstalling a lot of programs, doing a lot of work with a lot of programs, perhaps some basic multitasking and you'll see how 'stable' it is.

That's such BS it's not even funny. And programs not uninstalling properly is not Vista's fault, that would be the result of a crappy developer/bad coding.

And basic or advanced multitasking also works perfectly fine, and is very stable. Any enthusiast would agree with this. Please take your 2006 anti-Vista bias back to the trash where it belongs.

Here's some early Win7 benchmarks. And here's the full article.

 

[Anuba]

Try installing/uninstalling a lot of programs, doing a lot of work with a lot of programs, perhaps some basic multitasking and you'll see how 'stable' it is.

Your claims are getting more and more ridiculous by the minute, and I'm starting to suspect you haven't been near a Windows PC since the Win98 days. Just stereotypical, sweeping PC-hater clichées about instability, malware and the Windows registry, without any concrete examples to back it up. Malware? You don't get malware unless you're a clueless 13-year old who installs everything that moves, clicks "Yes" in every popup dialog on Eastern European porn sites and downloads tons of apps and games with embedded malware from Pirate Bay. I've never used AntiVirus software regularly in my 17 years with Windows. Once every 6 months or so I install an AntiVirus app and do a thorough scan, but I barely see the point anymore as they always come up empty handed.

Do you actually believe there's any PC user who doesn't do basic multitasking? I use Vista for at least 8 hours a day and I usually have 6-7 apps running a typical snapshot of my screen on any given day would have Photoshop, Flash, Excel, Outlook, iTunes or Windows Media Player, IE or Safari, and sometimes audio applications like Cubase, Wavelab and Reason. I did the same in XP, Win2K and Win98, at a time when basic multitasking was virtually a no-go on Macs because they didn't even have dynamic RAM allocation before OS X, you had to pre-allocate RAM for each application.

As for uninstalling/installing programs, you're on thin ice if you're going to defend the Mac in that respect. It used to be that you'd simply drag Mac apps to the Trash and they'd be "uninstalled", but nowadays app installations spew crap all over a Mac and if they weren't nice enough to provide you with an uninstallation script, or you weren't careful enough to save it, you have to go hunting for residual files in weird corners of the system. Once I installed a driver and software for a Yamaha firewire audio device on my iMac, and when I decided I was better off moving the Yamaha 01X back to the PC and uninstalled the driver using the provided script, I got the Leopard BSOD. I looked for hours until I finally found some miniscule MIDI settings file that Yamaha had missed in their script. And good luck trying to get rid of Logitech Control Center, should you ever have the guts to install that on a Mac. OS X is in sore need of a unified installation process and some sort of install/uninstall applet.

OS X is fine. Vista is fine. They're both stable, with the occasional odd crash once a week or so. They both have their pros and cons. Vista is ugly to look at with all its dazzling colors in the wrong places, OS X has networking capabilities from the 1950's. Vista bothers the hard disk too much with all its incessant background processes like SuperFetch, Defender and Defrag, OS X has a bloody annoying and primitive Software Update applet that always wants to reboot the system for every miniscule little "Camera Raw" update I don't want or need. None of this will stop me from getting my work done. Just give me the right apps installed on either platform and I'll get to work.

 

[tubbymac]

About the only thing I agree with the Apple fanboys on is that the Windows registry is complete and utter garbage.

Believe it or not there are some of us that have both a rock solid OSX setup and a rock solid Vista setup. My file server is running on a cheapo Dell Vista box and hasn't been rebooted in YEARS. The only time it reboots is when it does an autoupdate that requires a reboot, and most updates don't require this - just like the Apple software updates.

I plan to use Snow Leopard on my Apple machines and Windows 7 on my PC machines when both are released. Both have areas where one beats the other. If you think one completely dominates the other in all areas you're ignorant, or clueless, or both.

 

[Anuba]

So far I'm really liking what I see in Win7. A long standing wish of mine has been that they go back and update some ancient things that have been with the system since, I dunno, Win95; the Calculator, WordPad and the abysmal Font management. I didn't think they'd actually ever get around to it, but both those apps have been refreshed and the font management is almost as good as on Mac, and 10 times better than in Vista.

I also like the fact that Win7 reads AAC and DivX files natively. The new Windows Media Player is much better than the disaster that shipped with Vista (WMP11). The taskbar and window management improvements are great for the most part, though I'm not digging the default layout with the bigass icons all aligned to the left, or how they jump around all over the taskbar if you enable text labels. Libraries is great too, but it's ridiculous that you can't include network shares in them (because those can't be indexed, as if I would care about that).

What I'd like to see in Snow Leopard, umm... other than the promised performance improvements there are some aspects of OS X that feel really dated. One is QuickTime, but it looks like they're taking care of that and implementing an interface similar to WMP12 with controls that overlap the video area and fade away when you release the mouse. Another thing in OS X that feels miserably dated is the Software Updates applet. Everything, from the stupid and overly enthusiastic globe (WOHOO! I FOUND AN UPDATE!!! I FOUND AN UPDATE!!! STOP EVERYTHING YOU'RE DOING AND DOWNLOAD THIS USELESS CAMERA RAW UPDATE NOW!!!) to the fact that it wants to reboot the system for nearly everything. I'd prefer it to be more like Windows Update in Vista/Win7, which installs everything silently except once every two months or so when it wants to reboot. And, more importantly, shows you a complete back log of everything you've installed. And finally, I'd like to be able to map a network drive permanently with extreme ease. Something is very wrong when a thing is ten times easier and more intuitive to do in Windows than in OS X.

Oh, and I'd like BootCamp to actually work. As long as it doesn't do fan control in Windows, and cripples firewire performance so much it's unusable for audio devices in Windows due to a bug in Apple's keyboard driver (sounds unrelated, but it's true), I'm holding off my purchase of one Mac Pro and one MacBook Pro 17"... if it doesn't handle Win7 like the best of PCs, I'm getting actual PCs...

 

[tubbymac]

I also like the fact that Win7 reads AAC and DivX files natively.

Oh, and I'd like BootCamp to actually work. As long as it doesn't do fan control in Windows, and cripples firewire performance so much it's unusable for audio devices in Windows due to a bug in Apple's keyboard driver (sounds unrelated, but it's true), I'm holding off my purchase of one Mac Pro and one MacBook Pro 17"... if it doesn't handle Win7 like the best of PCs, I'm getting actual PCs...

I like how Win7 reads AAC/DivX/Xvid without additional codecs but am irritated by how QuickTunes AAC Plus audio files don't get automatically listed under the network. By default .m4a files aren't "media shared" until you go mucking about the registry to change the settings.

I've given up hope on bootcamp myself. I actually got it to run pretty well with all the great advice and tips I found on this forum - even worked around the keyboard driver problem you mentioned. But I couldn't find a way to get around the absolute garbage that Apple has written for a trackpad driver and couldn't get around the 2 hours of battery life.

So I bought another PC machine to run Windows on (high end Dell) and am now much happier. My Apple machines run OSX and my PC machines run Windows or Linux. Instead of 2 hours of battery life on my Macbook bootcamp I'm pushing 6.5 to 9 hours on my PC notebook with Windows 7 and actually have a working trackpad with good drivers. Until Apple can give me the same experience Windows won't be touching my Macbook again (which is probably what they wanted, lol).

 

[Anuba]

So I bought another PC machine to run Windows on (high end Dell) and am now much happier. My Apple machines run OSX and my PC machines run Windows or Linux. Instead of 2 hours of battery life on my Macbook bootcamp I'm pushing 6.5 to 9 hours on my PC notebook with Windows 7 and actually have a working trackpad with good drivers. Until Apple can give me the same experience Windows won't be touching my Macbook again (which is probably what they wanted, lol).

Argh... the more I think about it, the more torn I am.

I have a Dell Precision M65 notebook and an XPS700 desktop, both up for replacement. I thought hey, why not go with a MBP 17" and a Mac Pro and use BootCamp. Then I noticed how pricey they are, and decided I'd go with Dell again. Then I started looking at Dell's notebooks and realized that A) the MBP 17" isn't so pricey after all next to a maxed-out Dell, B) the Precision 17" is heee-uge, like 2½ MBPs stacked, and in typical Dell fashion they have a lot of worthless ancient ports like VGA (is it 1992 already?). So it was back to Macs again. Then I found out all this crap about BootCamp not being up to scratch. Back to Dells. Then I read that the Dell desktop I had picked out has an obscene amount of fan noise (a killer for audio work). Back to Macs. Then I found out how much AppleCare sucks, that they won't stop by my house to do repairs like Dell does (for less money, too). Back to Dells. No wait, dammit, I want a Mac. But what about all my glorious Logitech peripherals, some of which are PC-only? OK, back to Dell. Or no, I want a Mac. No wait... the MBP has that godawful shrunken keyboard I have on my wireless Apple keyboard for my iMac. They've made the cursor keys so incredibly small I always keep missing them (hey, they're only the most important keys of all so let's make them microscopic just to fit all keys into a tidy rectangle). OK, this is it, I'm going Dell. No wait... I just remembered all the crap I went through with getting firewire audio to work on my desktop PC, then I tried it on my iMac and the performance was wicked (gotta love CoreAudio)... OK, Macs. No. Dell. Mac. Dac. Mell. Bah.

 

[Jpoon]

It's simple.

Windows 7 is no more than Vista, with a little different design, some removed programs, and which basically went back to Xp's speed, and improved it a bit. So it's just a little faster than Xp, (And I don't care about what tests say, I'm talking about my experience).

So, Snow Leopard will make Leopard even faster than it is. Which means, it'll certainly be faster than Windows 7.

That's all about speed.

And about all the other things, well, it's just like the previous versions:

Speed/Performance: Snow Leopard.
Security: Snow Leopard.
Stability: Snow Leopard.
Design: ?, we still don't know how the Snow Leopard design will be. Windows 7's design is basically identical to Vista, so I'd give this to Snow Leopard.
Best 64-bit system: Snow Leopard.

So for what is Windows better? For...em...nothing, except if you're looking for the cheapest computer you'll use only and only for games, nothing too serious.

Oh, and you can customize Windows, there are thousands of horrible, disgusting themes you can find online!

Have fun.



And because it's unstable. And slow. And easily infectable.



BS, it naturally gets slower the more you use it, the more you install program. Just like any other Windows version.



BS again. It's because of the instability. The registry. Partial uninstallations. Malware. It's not just about drivers.

You're making these assumptions based on opinions. Granted, I believe Snow Leapord is going to probably have a better overall experience *or they'd lose a bit of business since Apple smeared Vista the past two years as their advertisement campaign.*

Just because we're on Macrumors doesn't mean we need to resort to opinionated arguments to prove that OS X on a Mac is a better overall experience that Windows 7. As I recall, Safari got hacked on a Macbook just as fast as IE as well as FireFox. That also has a lot to do with how the OS works. The fact that OS X is a small percentage of the overall personal computing pie, can be attributed to the lack of malware and viruses that affect Macintosh computers.

Please, just discuss the benefits, rather than making arguments about a beta build of a competing OS (which really controls most of the market and blah blah blah).

 

[Jpoon]

About the only thing I agree with the Apple fanboys on is that the Windows registry is complete and utter garbage.

Believe it or not there are some of us that have both a rock solid OSX setup and a rock solid Vista setup. My file server is running on a cheapo Dell Vista box and hasn't been rebooted in YEARS. The only time it reboots is when it does an autoupdate that requires a reboot, and most updates don't require this - just like the Apple software updates.

I plan to use Snow Leopard on my Apple machines and Windows 7 on my PC machines when both are released. Both have areas where one beats the other. If you think one completely dominates the other in all areas you're ignorant, or clueless, or both.

Words of wisdom here people.

 

[tubbymac]

Hah sounds similar to the back and forth I do between machines. I really tried to make bootcamp work. I absolutely love the design of my Macbook and no other machine by any other company comes close to how good this thing looks. But after months struggling to get around roadblocks in bootcamp that Apple threw up, I finally threw in the towel. It's just not worth the frustration, even for something as beautiful as this machine. Just to give you an idea of the difference. On my Macbook under bootcamp with my SSD I got about 2 hours of battery life and it took about a minute to boot. Switching over to my PC I get typically 6.5 hours and it takes 25 seconds to boot. Under bootcamp I had to download some wacky utilities and do an elevated command prompt to patch the Apple keyboard driver so that it was affinity locked to one CPU instead of two. Otherwise you get those latency issues you mentioned. On my PC I don't have to do any such nonsense.

OSX on my Macbook gives me no headaches. It works well. But Windows on it is a pain in the arse. I've got better things to do with my time than deal with that frustration. If you have the money, just get an Apple for OSX and a PC for Windows if you need it and save yourself the headaches I went through.

Also if you do decide on a Dell never buy them at full price. Go through the outlet store and they are dirt cheap. Anyways, here's a link to my current experience with the Dell if you're interested:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=364436

For the observant you'll notice I used a modified version of the Snow Leopard wallpaper on my machine because Windows comes with horribly ugly wallpapers

 

[Stridder44]

Hah sounds similar to the back and forth I do between machines. I really tried to make bootcamp work. I absolutely love the design of my Macbook and no other machine by any other company comes close to how good this thing looks. But after months struggling to get around roadblocks in bootcamp that Apple threw up, I finally threw in the towel. It's just not worth the frustration, even for something as beautiful as this machine. Just to give you an idea of the difference. On my Macbook under bootcamp with my SSD I got about 2 hours of battery life and it took about a minute to boot. Switching over to my PC I get typically 6.5 hours and it takes 25 seconds to boot. Under bootcamp I had to download some wacky utilities and do an elevated command prompt to patch the Apple keyboard driver so that it was affinity locked to one CPU instead of two. Otherwise you get those latency issues you mentioned. On my PC I don't have to do any such nonsense.

AMEN.

I mean I know Snow Leopards new stuff is nice and all, but good God I hope they include Boot Camp 3.0. Boot Camp is a joke as it is right now. Driver support (for their own hardware no less, like the trackpad for example) is laughable.

 

[Anuba]

Hah sounds similar to the back and forth I do between machines. I really tried to make bootcamp work. I absolutely love the design of my Macbook and no other machine by any other company comes close to how good this thing looks. But after months struggling to get around roadblocks in bootcamp that Apple threw up, I finally threw in the towel. It's just not worth the frustration, even for something as beautiful as this machine. Just to give you an idea of the difference. On my Macbook under bootcamp with my SSD I got about 2 hours of battery life and it took about a minute to boot. Switching over to my PC I get typically 6.5 hours and it takes 25 seconds to boot. Under bootcamp I had to download some wacky utilities and do an elevated command prompt to patch the Apple keyboard driver so that it was affinity locked to one CPU instead of two. Otherwise you get those latency issues you mentioned. On my PC I don't have to do any such nonsense.

That bad huh... that would actually settle it for me, if it weren't for the hope that maybe they've improved BootCamp for Snow Leopard...

I've been looking at a Precision machine that's pretty much identical to your Latitude E6500 there. But I'm typing on its predecessor M65 right now, and the thing is... I really want a 17". Or actually, what I want is 1920x1200.
I have 1680x1050 on this 15" which I've used for 3 years, and in that time I've gone from 20/20 vision to glasses. The eye strain is horrible, and to think that I could actually get a 15" from Dell with 1920x1200... I'd be blind after a year. But like I said, the 17" Precision M6400 is a monster. Granted, you get a full keyboard with numpad, up to 16 GB DDR3 RAM, a 1 GB NVidia Quadro card and two RAID configured hard disks, but it's so big I might as well snap the desk stand off the iMac and call it a laptop. And fully outfitted it's actually more expensive than the MBP 17". Didn't think that was possible, but it is.

I'm also using Dell's docking solution (D/View and D/Port on mine, they're up to E/View and E/Port now) and I love it. There's not a single cable visible on my desk. Since Apple refuse to do docking stations I'd have to put up with a lot of cable spaghetti. So that's another nail in the coffin for my MBP plans.

Meh, what the heck... it's still a few months away. I'll probably buy machines when Snow Leopard and Win7 are out. Plenty of time to make a decision.

As for prices... when I bought the machines I have now, I was about to order them online but the site was temporarily down so I called them instead. That's when I discovered that their sales reps can give you insane deals if you order by phone... this guy gave me 10% off plus threw in 3-year business support and CompleteCare (the equivalent of AppleCare except that Dell repairs laptops in your home) and a 3-year insurance that he described as follows: "You can basically smash the machine up with a sledgehammer and they'll give you a new one, no questions asked".

 

[pdxflint]

Argh... the more I think about it, the more torn I am.

I have a Dell Precision M65 notebook and an XPS700 desktop, both up for replacement. I thought hey, why not go with a MBP 17" and a Mac Pro and use BootCamp. Then I noticed how pricey they are, and decided I'd go with Dell again. Then I started looking at Dell's notebooks and realized that A) the MBP 17" isn't so pricey after all next to a maxed-out Dell, B) the Precision 17" is heee-uge, like 2½ MBPs stacked, and in typical Dell fashion they have a lot of worthless ancient ports like VGA (is it 1992 already?). So it was back to Macs again. Then I found out all this crap about BootCamp not being up to scratch. Back to Dells. Then I read that the Dell desktop I had picked out has an obscene amount of fan noise (a killer for audio work). Back to Macs. Then I found out how much AppleCare sucks, that they won't stop by my house to do repairs like Dell does (for less money, too). Back to Dells. No wait, dammit, I want a Mac. But what about all my glorious Logitech peripherals, some of which are PC-only? OK, back to Dell. Or no, I want a Mac. No wait... the MBP has that godawful shrunken keyboard I have on my wireless Apple keyboard for my iMac. They've made the cursor keys so incredibly small I always keep missing them (hey, they're only the most important keys of all so let's make them microscopic just to fit all keys into a tidy rectangle). OK, this is it, I'm going Dell. No wait... I just remembered all the crap I went through with getting firewire audio to work on my desktop PC, then I tried it on my iMac and the performance was wicked (gotta love CoreAudio)... OK, Macs. No. Dell. Mac. Dac. Mell. Bah.

Best post in a long time... thoroughly entertaining...

 

[Mackan]

Wow, so much ******** in these threads. I wanted to contribute a bit myself.