PC vs Mac (Windows XP / Windows 7 vs OSX Snow Leopard)

This review will compare some of the basic features of Personal Computer running Windows XP and Windows 7 (I hate Windows Vista) with Mac computers running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. While this review might indicate that one system is better than the other (for some aspects), the original intention was to help new learners to understand the differences, as well as strengths and weaknesses of the two systems.

The Hardware

PC has thousands of models from different manufacturers. Mac computers only produced by Apple and has limited number of options.

To me, I love Mac that combines advanced technology with style. It makes a computer “more human” and would fit as part of home decoration. From iMac to Mac Mini, from MacBook to MacBook Pro, they have products for different needs.

PC computers, though some manufacturers already release newer models with pretty looks (smaller CPU casing, integrated-with-monitor PC, etc) still the most popular model is the “old and classic” computer where CPU is located in an over-sized casing with a lot of heat fans that might sound noisy is used near midnight.

Customizable is still one of the plus point of PC. If you need greater flexibility in deciding what should be in your computer, then maybe a Mac is not for you. But as I believe most people simply want a computer that works, that they can use, then Mac would still be my choice.

Windows vs OS X Overall Appearance

As desktop appearance in modern operating systems are generally customizable, both systems produces nice and elegant look using their own style.

Windows 7 brings fresh ideas in their taskbar and menus, though I would argue that the idea is not entirely theirs. To me, it sorta look similar to Snow Leopard’s dock concept.

Windows XP vs Snow Leopard : OS X is the clear winner. It is more stylish, simple and comfortable to use.

Windows 7 vs Snow Leopard : there is no absolute winner for this comparison; it’s about taste, I guess. New users would probably confused for a while about the location of close button (Windows on the right, OSX on the left), about the different function of Windows button vs Mac button, and about the concept of “closing a window” vs “closing an application”; but other than those, switching from one system to another is not that hard.

Startup & Shutdown Time

Windows XP startup time is slow, yet somehow people learned to “accept” it after using it for years. Its shutdown time is also slow, sometimes can be very irritating when we need to restart.

Windows Vista is the worst in everything ! Forget it !

Snow Leopard startup time is fast. My fully loaded system starts in less than a minute. The shutdown time is almost instant, impressive !

Windows 7 startup time is a lot faster than any other previous Windows. Microsoft deserves two thumbs up from me for their good work this time. Shutdown time also reasonably ok, slightly longer than Snow Leopard’s.

File Management : Windows Explorer vs Mac Finder

Working with Windows Explorer was never a problem for me as I already used to it for many years. It provides all the basic needs for most users and generally we don’t need to install or purchase additional software to help us in file management.

Working with Mac’s Finder, however, can be very tricky, especially for ex Windows users who changed to Mac. They might, ummm, they will surely miss some of the convenient “basic” feature such as “cut and paste” !
Yes, you read it right, Finder does now allow us to “cut” a file and paste it somewhere else. Instead, we need to “copy” the file, “paste” it somewhere, and delete the original. Small thing? Sure. But when you do need to perform a lot of file moving, this can be frustrating.

Other notable issue is the different concept of Windows’ tree hierarchy look for folders vs Mac’s different approach. In Mac, we can see our files and folders as a list, as icons, as column and as cover flow.

In Windows, if we copy or move a folder (with contents) to a new location where another folder with same name already exists, it will ask if we want to replace the folder. If we answer “yes”, Windows will “merge” the two folders resulting all files from the original folders and all files from the upcoming folder will exist together. In Mac, if we choose to “replace”, it will “wipe out” the existing folder with all its contents and replace it with the new one.

There is an interesting software in Mac to help us dealing with file management. It’s called Path Finder. It provides us with a lot of useful feature that Finder is missing, but it does not come free.

Backup & Restore

Mac OS X Snow Leopard provides an excellent backup and restore tool called Time Machine. It requires an external drive so it can backup EVERYTHING there. Yes, everything ! From all your files, your installed programs, your settings, your libraries, everything ! No complicated setting, just prepare your external drive, tell Time Machine to use it as backup drive, and you’re done !

Restoring is also never been easier. Simply insert the original disc coming with the Mac package, plug in the external backup drive, follow some instructions and menus, and … done, everything we had before will be restored ! Just like nothing ever happened.

Windows backup and restore program has disappointed me many times in the past and I don’t plan to use them again. There are, of course, third party applications being sold by different companies, but I have no intention to try them all. When things go wrong with Windows, it is always easiest to reinstall (as long as we have our files backed up).

File backup from a Mac computer to external drive can be handled by various options of applications. My choice is ChronoSync. It works fine synchronizing two external hard disk of 1.5 TB each with no problem.

Working with Images & Photos

The default Windows Explorer is good enough to see images and photos. If you need something “more comfortable to use”, then buy ACDSee. It simpl the best tool available that I know so far.

In Mac, there is a built-in viewer called “Preview” which also does reasonably good job as good as Windows Explorer. It loads images fast, easy to use, integrates with Finder. It can even open PDF files !

I personally expect something similar to ACDSee in Mac. After searching for few weeks, finally got gBrowser, the best image viewer application for Mac. It works really smooth and gives me as much as ACDSee.

There is also an interesting application in Snow Leopard called iPhoto. This is the best photo organizer I have ever used so far. After importing my photos, it can recognizes faces so that we can assign faces in photos with friends from our Address Book. Photos can be uploaded to FaceBook, Flickr and other social networking sites just by few clicks. We can also assign a photo with a place, connected with GPS coordinate so we can see our photo places in a world map ! Pretty impressive !

Playing Musics

Windows can play music with Windows Media Player, WinAmp, iTunes (Mac’s music player, available in Windows version) and many other third party softwares.

In Snow Leopard, iTunes is already bundled by default. It runs smooth with no problem. It helps us to manage our music collection in a library. iTunes library comes very handy if you own a music player from Apple (iPod, iPhone). With few clicks you can have all your music transferred, managed and synchronized. You can also buy music, video and other stuff directly from the iTunes application.

Sometimes when all you need is just playing an MP3 file because you want to test something without the intention to add it into library, using iTunes can be tricky. If all you need is a simple MP3 player that plays music (no library, no complicated settings, etc), then you might want to try this Vox player freeware.

Playing Movies

Playing standard movies (mpg and standard avi) are generally not a problem for both operating systems. Windows has WMP (Windows Media Player) and OS X has QuickTime player. However, if you often download latest movies from the Internet, there will be some that won’t play because of CODEC inavailability.

For Windows, one single solution is available by downloading K-Lite Mega Codec. It is constantly updated with the latest development of movie encoding. So if you find a movie you can not play with it, just check for latest update, download, and it will play !

For OS X, we have VLC Player and MPlayer OSX Extended. These are the best two movie player for Mac, at least up to Snow Leopard version. There is also Perian, a super plugin for QuickTime that allows it to play a lot more formats. I have all these three downloads installed and so far have not found any movie I can’t play.

Working with Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations

Though one might argue, I believe that one of Windows’ best selling point is their Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook). Being used for more than a decade, this has been the most widely used office package application in the world. There are alternatives, of course, from Open Office to Kingsoft Office, which offer us cheaper (or even free) version of office package, but none of these have reached significant market penetration up to the date of this article.

Mac OS X offers Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) with a discount if purchased together with a brand new Mac. Even iWork is fully compatible with Microsoft Office, there is also available the actual Microsoft Office for Mac, sold at almost similar price to the Windows version.

As for me, I personally choose Ms Word over iWork Pages, and prefer Ms Excel over iWork Numbers. For presentations, however, I choose iWork Keynote rather than Ms PowerPoint.

Hard Drive File System

Different file system has been a problem for users using both PC and Mac. Windows uses NTFS file system, and maintain compatibility with the old FAT system. Mac uses HFS natively, provides read-write support for FAT and provides read only support for NTFS (starting from Snow Leopard).

Mac’s HFS is solid and stable. But there is no practical way to bring a HFS formatted hard drive to a Windows computer for file transfer. Yes there are softwares that enables Windows to read HFS but those are NOT cheap !

Windows’s NTFS is also stable. And in this case, Mac has provided better support by making them readable in their machines, even still read only. There are rumours that the NTFS driver for Snow Leopard is actualy read-write, but somehow Apple delays the launch of the “write” function.

That leaves FAT as the only file system fully accessible by both systems. One problem is, FAT file system is not really stable, especially when installed in a large hard disk (larger than 300 GB) with a lot of small files. File names get “magically” messed up randomly, and that’s not good !

One alternative that I finally choose is installing Paragon NTFS, a third party software to enable NTFS read-write in Mac. Then I change my external drives’ file format to NTFS (file format can be changed by Mac’s Disk Utility from Applications > Utility). Works fine so far.

Internet Browsing

For internet browsing, I have left Microsoft Internet Explorer for long time. Mozilla Firefox provides better functionality and faster browsing, everything you need from a browser.

Since Mozilla Firefox is cross platform, I can also use it in Snow Leopard. For download accelerator, I use DownThemAll, a small and free add-on for Firefox.

Or you might also want to try Google Chrome browser in both Windows and OS X. Same software, same functionality. No problem. Nothing to compare.

Apple’s native browser Safari, though available for Mac and PC, works a lot better in Mac. With its seamless integration to the operating system, Safari offers the deepest functionality in Snow Leopard environment.

One more handy tips in working with multiple computers, multiple operating systems and/or multiple browsers : use bookmark synchronizer. It will ineffective to have different set of bookmark in each of your computer / operating system / browser and can’t find the corrent bookmark that you need when you need them fast. The best free bookmark synchronizer I would recommmend is Xmarks. It supports Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Email

For email, Windows offers the standard Outlook Express for free. And Microsoft Outlook for better functionality. Snow Leopard offers default email module called “Mail”. Both works fine. Except that with Mac’s Mail, we don’t have to worry about losing your emails as long as we use Time Machine regularly.

For me, I don’t really care about email application because I use Google’s Gmail as my primary email. For both personal and work emails. Since Gmail is a web-based service, Windows and OS X can both access it with no problem.

Notable mention : Mozilla also has Mozilla Thunderbird as a popular email client. Free, open source and cross platform.

FTP

In Windows, I usually use CuteFTP to transfer files to and from my FTP servers. Since CuteFTP is not available for Mac, I have to find a replacement. The most popular FTP client for Mac is Cyberduck. It provides as with a very simple and basic interface that actually works. Later on, my choice went to FileZilla, an open source (and free) FTP client available for both PC and Mac.

Calendars, Tasks and Address Book

Microsoft Outlook generally provides the features for calendars, tasks and address book in Windows. In Snow Leopard, we can choose either to use Microsoft Entourage (part of Microsoft Office for Mac, a replacement of Microsoft Outlook) or we can use OS X’s default applications iCal and Address Book.

Again, I personally don’t really care about those applications because I use Google Calendar for my calendar, I use Toodledo for my tasks (to-do list) and I use Gmail Address Book to keep my friends’ phone numbers and emails.

By using Google Calendar, I got the same calendar everywhere I go. I can arrange my schedule at home, at work, or even in my mobile devices (it is accessible from iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian or some other mobile phones with internet connectivity). There is no need to worry about data loss if our computer crashes or experences some problems. With Google Calendar, we can also invite people to events, share calendars to others, sorta like collaboration tool. And best of all, it’s totally free.

Torrent Download

I used to be a great fan of Azureus for torrent download. Long ago before they changed name to Vuze and started loading their torrent client with a lot of unnecessary stuff. The last version of Vuze that I tested used too much of my computer’s memory and slowed down other applications.

So, no more Azureus or Vuze now. I use µTorrent for Windows 7 and use Transmission for Snow Leopard. Both are lightweight torrent client that simply downloads ! You can define priorities, you can set speed limit, you can select which files to download (for torrent with multiple files) and you can use magnet links. Sweet but works. No more unnecessary modules.

Internet Messenger & Social Networking

Internet messenger is an important factor of computer usage nowadays. Yahoo Messenger and Skype (the two internet messenger I use most frequent) are both available for Windows and Mac OSX.

Social networking such as FaceBook and Twitter are generally web-based. Any operating system with a browser should be able to access those. Flock, a browser derived from Mozilla, is a browser dedicated for social networking. Give it a try and see if it fits your need or not.

Disc Burning

Data disc creation feature is now provided built in from both Windows Explorer and Mac’s Finder. However, other kinds of discs such as DVD movie, bootable discs etc still need additional software(s).

For Windows, I would say that Nero is the best disc burner software. Finding an ideal burner for Mac is still a challenge for me. A simple tool called Burn can generally help us in most tasks. Or we can choose the complete-but-overkill software like Roxio Toast.

One thing to mention is that all my previous CDs and DVDs from Windows that was burnt using multisession are not correctly readable by Mac machine. I can only read the first session of the discs and the rests are inaccessible.

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Though I certainly enjoy working with Snow Leopard, I would not go too far by recommending it to all of you. In the end, I believe it depends on each person’s need and expectations to choose.

Robert