Thursday, August 2, 2012
Windows 7 vs Mac OS X
The first thing that I wanted to find out is
Is the Apple OS X so much better than Windows 7?
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:
- The availability of large amounts of software applications
- I am sure I think of something else to add here, someday.
How does Mac OS X score on these points ?
Clearly, the UNIX operating system handles the operating system while the user simply uses the applications. Although Windows should be functioning in the same way, you still find yourself often intervening in the management of the operating system.
Big, bigger, biggest
Although I removed all the un-installers, downloaded packages and temporary files under Windows 7, the system folder still contained 20 Gb of data. In total I managed to remove about 15 Gb of wasted disk space. This also meant that Windows itself was larger than all my installed applications. And Windows continued to grow every day. This is about 10% of disk space on a 256 GB SSD disk.
OS X on the other hand takes up 8 Gb of disk space. And, for what I have heard up till now, it should not grow too much over time. Of course, newly installed applications will take up some disk space but the files won't be scattered all over place. And OS X will not copy the installation packages and un-installers into some mysterious system folder.
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.
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.
Apple can focus on a limited number of hardware devices and make sure that the OS X is compatible with all their hardware.
I used to work on a DELL Studio XPS with HD screen, 4 Gb of RAM and a 256 SSD disk. Under Windows the SSD performance was already remarkable but compared to the SSD disk installed in this MacBook Pro , it was rather slow.
Not only is the MacBook Pro slimmer,lighter and quieter it is much faster. True, I am not able to upgrade my disk or RAM. But I never do so anyways because the technology evolves so fast that after 3 years your motherboard, Ultra SATA connectors, USB 2.0 are outdated. The only option left is to buy a new machine.
User Interface
It is well known that OS X focuses a lot more on design and usability. And yes, I am glad that I no longer have to go thru the Windows menu's, shortcuts, properties and start searching for the locations of settings and disabling all sorts of unwanted features that take up more resources than needed.
If you ask me, Microsoft simply keeps on moving and renaming the same functionalities in order to sell more MCSE certificates. Let's be honest, changing the network settings of your network card under Windows 7 has become more of a hassle than under Windows 2000.
The only thing that bothers me in both Windows and OS X is the absence of a decent dual pane file browser like Xplorer2. I rarely use the Apple Finder as I bought a file manager called Disk Order.
By default the Finder application sorts the files and folders alphabetically. But unlike in Windows, the files appear in between the folders which is confusing and makes it harder to find a specific folder.
You can influence this a little bit by changing the view options. Open Finder and choose View from the menu and select Show view options. Change Arranged By to Kind and set Sort By to Name.
By default the Finder application sorts the files and folders alphabetically. But unlike in Windows, the files appear in between the folders which is confusing and makes it harder to find a specific folder.
You can influence this a little bit by changing the view options. Open Finder and choose View from the menu and select Show view options. Change Arranged By to Kind and set Sort By to Name.
Like many of you, I also upgraded to Mountain Lion and was a bit disappointed that Apple did not upgrade the Finder application as well. Dual pane with tabs would have made me happier than the changes made to Mail. Anyways, I now use Spotlight Cmd + Spacebar to quickly find and open files, folders and applications.
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