Now here's an interesting question:

Is Windows 7 at par or better than the Mac OS X?

I am curious to see what people think of this, as I have only used Vista, and not Windows 7, and in my opinionl, OS X was better than Vista...

Quote: Original post by kryotech
Is Windows 7 at par or better than the Mac OS X?

I would say on-par with Mac OSX. Of course, my opinion is that Mac OSX is nothing special, and people claiming "best.. OS... evah!" are smoking something, so YMMV.

Quote: Original post by RycrossOf course, my opinion is that Mac OSX is nothing special

Indeed. I know a few long term Mac fanboys who all complain about Snow Leopard being a complete trainwreck and I've got no reason to doubt them, especially having seen people moaning on various forums about loads of different issues. At least logging into a Windows guest account won't hose the system administrator's files, and Windows can run Flash without seizing up completely.

I used Tiger every day for a whole academic year one time when I was at University and it was fine. Full of useless gizmos (what's the point in all those Dashboard widgets when it involves interrupting what you're doing to use them? At least Vista/W7 has them hovering over the desktop so you can dip in and out at will, you don't need to dim the screen and lose focus over your other apps) but otherwise solid enough.

(Granted, I've got another friend who installed Snow Leopard as an upgrade over standard Leopard and it was a disaster. He reinstalled it clean and suddenly became perfectly happy with it, so maybe that's something else to consider)

Windows 7 seems pretty good so far in my experience, Have had a few compatibility issues with XP era audio equipment, but other than that no problems. I went straight from XP to 7, and to be honest it's not really any different at all, just a little shinier.

Quote: Original post by kryotech
Is Windows 7 at par or better than the Mac OS X?

It is 6-of-one, half-a-dozen of the other.

Windows 7 still suffers from many of the old complaints about Windows: programs will lockup regularly for no apparent reason, file browser doesn't always notice changes when it needs to refresh, etc.

I grew up on Macs, and I am a little biased towards the Mac UI paradigm and the unix under-pinnings, so I won't comment on either of those aspects. In an ideal world I would be running a Mac right now, but cost and lack of support for advanced GPU features leaves me running Windows 7.

Quote: Original post by Rycross

Quote: Original post by kryotech
Is Windows 7 at par or better than the Mac OS X?

I would say on-par with Mac OSX. Of course, my opinion is that Mac OSX is nothing special, and people claiming "best.. OS... evah!" are smoking something, so YMMV.

Depends on what you are looking for?
For reliablity and long term use Mac OS X wins hands down. The reason for this is Windows single point of failure i.e. use of registry. If you use a Windows box long enough and install enough apps this will usually fail. Actually, that's the main reason I finally installed Windows 7 is that after about a year my Vista install registry got so full of junk it pretty much failed :(
Been running Win7 on main game rig since RTM release and haven't had a registry failure or had to reinstall it yet so it definitely seems more stable and robust than Vista or XP ever was.
Windows is better for gaming since that's where most of the games are. Even if as many games were made for Mac OS X Windows would still have the edge since the video drivers are updated more often. On Mac OS X you are at the mercy of Apple for drivers.
Having used Vista in the past, IMO Windows 7 is for the most part just a slimmed down version of Vista with service pack fixes thrown in so if you are already using Vista I wouldn't be in a rush to upgrade.
With a nearly incomprehensible upgrade chart and the whole in-place vs "custom upgrade" as Microsoft now calls it Windows 7 could've easily failed but sales say otherwise.
One reason IMO was that Microsoft was smart enough this time, unlike with Vista, to actually promote the product and hype it up just like Jobs did with the iPad.
And most people will be getting Win7 on a new computer and not upgrading and on a new machine it's almost as nice as Mac OS X so of course that majority is going to drown out all the negative publicity from people trying to upgrade and losing all their data and the upgrade failing with a black screen which seemed to be common at one point(see Amazon reviews).
Another reason it has been so successful is that from the start Microsoft offered huge discounts, for example students could get it for $20, and for the first time ever Microsoft copied Apple and actually sold a family pack version of Windows 7 where you could install it on more than one computer.
So in the end a large part of it comes down to marketing I guess.
If you want more info on the tech that's changed in Win7 that most people won't notice watch the excellent Mark Rusinovich Win7 video on it.

[Edited by - daviangel on February 15, 2010 6:16:01 PM]

>>Windows 7 could've easily failed but sales say otherwise.

you do realize the vast bulk of thos are OEM sales eg buy a dell PC it has windows7 on it.

retail sales of windows7 are truly shockingly pitiful(*) when u think its the most recent release of the worlds most popular OS

the recently released win7 shifted 290k units in the US over the holiday period, contrast this with many console games that often shift >million units in the same period

(*)well I was shocked when I saw the sales numbers :)

Windows 7 didn't sell that much as an OS? I'm not really surprised, cause it seems as though no one announced if Windows 7 succeeded or not...........

Quote: Original post by zedz
>>Windows 7 could've easily failed but sales say otherwise.

you do realize the vast bulk of thos are OEM sales eg buy a dell PC it has windows7 on it.

retail sales of windows7 are truly shockingly pitiful(*) when u think its the most recent release of the worlds most popular OS

you can ignore OEM sales all you want, but if I were upgrading to Windows 7 (aside from the fact that I did because it was free for me) I would probably just buy a new computer and be perfectly satisfied with windows 7.

A decent Windows 7 laptop only costs 400 bucks more than a copy of windows 7. Many every day towers even less. If the average user is going to probably have their hard-drive formatted in the upgrade, they probably won't mind just getting a new computer and anyone who won't want to spend the other cash probably wouldn't really care about upgrading to windows 7 anyway.

Quote: Original post by zedz
>>Windows 7 could've easily failed but sales say otherwise.

you do realize the vast bulk of thos are OEM sales eg buy a dell PC it has windows7 on it.

retail sales of windows7 are truly shockingly pitiful(*) when u think its the most recent release of the worlds most popular OS

the recently released win7 shifted 290k units in the US over the holiday period, contrast this with many console games that often shift >million units in the same period

(*)well I was shocked when I saw the sales numbers :)

I fail to see your point. Most windows users do not upgrade their OS. They buy a new pc. If they buy a new windows pc instead of a mac, win7 has done it's job.