Apple Times

What I "dislike" about Windows:

• An overall "American" approach "It can't be big enough"
• The registry that grows every day
• The 'install/uninstall' folders that take up more space than the actual applications themselves
• The inability of Windows to "clean-up" the temporary folders, update downloads,etc.
• The vulnerability (Viruses, registry accessible to everyone, etc.)
• The overall performance which is rather low seen the high performance machines of today
• The pricing of Microsoft software packages like MS-Office (Word, Excel and all those applications have been around for 30 years or so and are still so expensive)
• The 32-bit driver incompatibility on the 64-bit OS (When installing a 32-bit application that needs 32-bit drivers than it won't work out of the box. It is up to you to find origin of the problem and manually install and configure the 32-bit drivers.) 

What I "like" about Windows:

How does Mac OS X score on these points ?

Installing and uninstalling under OS X

In OS X an application consists of 1 package file (like a ZIP file) containing the application.
When you install an application it will either guide you thru an installation procedure or ask you to simply drag the file into your "Applications" folder.

When you need to uninstall an application you can simply delete it from this Application folder.
Being used to Windows I was searching for something like "Add/Remove Programs" , "Uninstall software" and finally found the solution on the internet.

Because all the files are inside this 1 package, which you just deleted, you are certain that no files are left behind.
Another great element about OS X is the absence of a registry file. So when installing and uninstalling applications you do not need to worry about references in the registry that are not deleted.

Security

With the growing number of "switchers" comes also the increased risks of viruses and spam-ware. I did install the Sophos anti-virus, despite the sales person's statement "you will have no problem with viruses on a Mac". And it found a spam virus in one of the files that I transferred from my Windows machine. 

My website has been a victim of hackers in the past and under Windows I used to download the entire website so that the Kaspersky anti-virus could scan all the files. With OS X and Sophos I scan my entire website online from within my OS X environment. Pretty cool.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the operating system's own security. But UNIX is by far more secured and closed down than Windows. A standard Windows allows anyone to edit its registry file (the backbone of Windows) from a remote computer. And Apple is also rather strict on security, which would explain why Adobe Flash is not installed by default.

Performance

The performance of a computer depends on hardware and software. This is where Apple can make a big difference versus Microsoft. Not only on performances and efficiency but also on compatibility. As Windows needs to foresee compatibility for all possible hardware devices, it needs to provide huge number of drivers. And with the registry and folder structure being polluted with every install and un-install, the overall performance decreases over time.