Windows 7 or Snow Leopard?

Question

I been keeping up with the news of windows 7 and snow leopard. And around December I will be buying a new laptop. Right now I have a hp laptop with windows vista. I have only used a mac book a couple of times at my school and I really like how it works. But I want to know which should I get at the end of the year another pc laptop with windows 7 or get a mac book with snow leopard. Also people are saying that windows 7 task bar is better than the max os x leopard dock. Which do you think is better?

Answer 1

Snow leperd rocks.

Answer 2

In my opinion, what really matters when selecting an operating system or a computer is what you do with it. I've never used the Snow Leopard system, although I have recently downloaded the Windows 7 RC.



Macintosh computers are notorious for being very user friendly as well as being well-engineered. PC computers are everywhere, and that's what the market usually targets. I don't find a real difference other than OS specific software and operating system.



If you wanted to, you could buy a Macbook and try it out AND install Windows Vista so you could have two operating systems. Both PC and Mac. There's a program that should come with Mac OS X Leopard, and possibly Snow Leopard called Bootcamp that allows you to boot into either Mac or Windows. Macintosh laptops are indeed expensive, and you'd have to buy a whole separate operating system. I should also mention that if you had compatibility issues from Vista, you can integrate Windows XP into 7, which lets you run programs as if you were running them on Windows XP. Literally.



But anyway, in my opinion, I find PCs to be better when it comes to price, system specs and my needs. Macintosh laptops, while great devices, are just too expensive and I can live without it.



Up to you! Hope I'm some help.

Answer 3

You should take a test drive of both Vista and Leopard and then decide. Forget the reliability and stability issues of Vista. Just look at it for how it looks and feels to you. Same with Leopard, get some hands on time with how it feels as a computing option. You need to do that before worrying about anything on the Internet says or feels on the topic. Who cares what those of on the Internet think. We're not using your computer, you are. So you need to get a feel for how the different OS's work. Both of the new OS choices are strong options (at least in what has been shown). I think Windows 7 will be a fine successor to XP (much like ME, Vista is just a mistake). Both should be solid performers for what they do. So I think you need to decide on the grander scale are you someone that requires a Windows computer or an OS X computer? That should drive the decision. But if you really want to get into the nuts and bolts, I would expect Snow Leopard to slightly outperform 7 in overall performance. Snow Leopard is adding in a variety of efficiency improvements, and yet is requiring vastly less space to install (who ever heard of an OS that requires less install space but runs more efficiently? certainly never from MS). Plus in general, how many people can run high end demanding applications on a Windows machine with 2GB of RAM? You can on a Mac (Final Cut Studio runs just fine with only 2GB of RAM). If you go Mac, buy Microsoft Office for Mac. Its far more universally used. And there are no issues of format conversion hiccups. Word is Word, Excel is Excel. Some of the locations for features/settings are different, but that's about it. iWork is cool, and if you're uber-Apple person its a doable choice, but I think a more sensible option is the Office for Mac package. If you go IBM Clone, I'd look to HP. If their 16t line goes native Windows 7 that would be a good choice. Or whatever line is equivalent to the 16t line, but Windows 7 based, that's what I would look to. It comes with Wireless N and HDMI out, its a nice system if you go Windows. Oh but if you just want to have both, you could get a MacBook Pro with say 500GB hard drive and install Windows 7 onto your MBP. We've been running Windows 7 RC on our Macs at work and its been running not to bad. So when the full version comes out, we'll definitely buy a copy or two for the office, just so we have it if we need it.

Answer 4

I can't really answer your main question on Windows 7 and Snow Leopard since I haven't been keeping up with the rumors and blogs of the upcoming programs. I hear Windows 7 though is supposed to return PCs to sanity like with XP, which some people actually "downgraded" to on their new PC purchases to avoid Vista.



I used to have a Compaq on XP and I loved it. It didn't have all those cool features like Apple's widgets, but it was stable and straightforward. I currently use a previous generation macbook pro on Leopard and I love the program to death. On my 2GB of ram the computer is fast and can easily multitask.



What I can advise you on though is your secondary question of Mic. Office or iWork software. I have both since I originally purchased the iWork since it was much cheaper than Mic. Office and I was easily able to learn of all the features and shortcuts and became fairly productive with it. I also like that Pages can be used not only as a Word document but a sort of layout software like Illustrator to a small degree with rulers, guides, and ability to make objects "float" causing them to be easily manageable around the page borders.



The only thing about iWork is its compatibility. It has gotten much better over time and you can easily export a document into a Word format, but no matter how comparative it is, as long as Pages uses formatting tools that Word doesn't have like the floating capability I mentioned, your documents will get screwed up. I learned to either keep my documents super basic that I know Word will recognize, or just turn everything into PDF formats so PCs can read them.



Besides the extra care in translating Pages to Word formatting, I would highly recommend iWork. It is fairly easy to use, even coming from a PC background, and with added features, you will get an entire design suite rather than just strictly a Word processing program.



P.S. even after loading Office on, I still use Pages for personal documents and note-taking. I just use Office when I know I will have to send it to a PC like my Resume for one, or for an Excel file.

Answer 5

If you want to buy a laptop with Windows 7, I would suggest you to wait longer. Because when a new OS comes out in the market, it would have some problems here and there. You might want to get your laptop with service pack1 later on.



I have tried the Release Candidate and it is pretty good in terms of starting up fast.

Answer 6

I think that the Snow Leopard version is better because I work for Apple and i've tried snow leopard and it is quite amazing, quite.