Mac OSX vs. Windows 7

[Yakl]

I have never used Mac OSX but am eager to learn the pros and cons of each operating system against the other and in your oppinion, which is the better operating system.

[asiafish]

I have never used Mac OSX but am eager to learn the pros and cons of each operating system against the other and in your oppinion, which is the better operating system.

I was an avid ThinkPadder and still prefer the hardware, but moved to Mac for the software. Suspend/resume that works reliably was the big one, and something Microsoft still hasn't mastered. I also like the lack of a registry and the almost total lack of malware.

There are things I prefer about Windows, but my MacBook Pro dual boots Windows 7 and uses that same boot partition as a VM in Parallels, so a Mac gives me more flexibility.

ALso there is the fact that while Windows is fully supported as a native OS on a modern Mac, OS X is unsupported and rarely works perfectly on a non-Apple PC. I wouldn't trust business-critical anything to a Hackintosh.

[Yakl]

So you mean document editing, and mostly personal usage is preferably better for you?

And the things you prefer about windows are?

But for enterprise a PC is more efficient, and practical?

[asiafish]

So you mean document editing, and mostly personal usage is preferably better for you?

And the things you prefer about windows are?

But for enterprise a PC is more efficient, and practical?

I own a small law firm and used to be mixed OS X (Leopard) and WIndows (Vista). I decided to standardize on one OS and looked at both Snow Leopard and WIndows 7 closely, then went with Snow Leopard.

Suspend/resume was the big one for me. I travel all the time and have been bitten too many times by Windows resume failures. OS X, and even classic Mac OS before, has had suspend/resume nailed from at least as far back as 1993, and it is still solid enough for mission-critical use. In 17 years, I have never had a Mac resume failure. I've had two so far with Windows 7, about 30 in Vista, and in XP it was so bad that I used hibernate instead.

Document editing and the like make no real difference regarding OS. Word for Windows and Word for Mac, to me, are fully interchangeable. Same with the other applications I use.

The other area that influenced my choice in platform was support time. My office is small, five people total, and none of them IT. I am a tech-savvy end-user (owner, attorney) and every hour that I spend working on computers is an hour that I can't spend working on my clients' cases, meaning I spend instead of earn money. OS X, on my non-IT, self-administered network (served with Windows Small Business Server 2008, which I also administer) tends to require less of my time. In Windows, my non savvy users would constantly come to me with "I can't print", or "I lost my network share". With OS X, the computer starts up, and it works all day. The time I spent playing IT guy went from about 2 hours per week to 2 hours per month.

What do I like better in WIndows? Quite a bit actually. OS X has a very strange manner in which it copies and pastes folders. Copy a folder from one location to another in Windows, and if there are duplicates, Windows will ask what you want to do with them. In OS X, it will just ask if you want to replace the old folder with the new one. This is a big deal that can lead to data loss if you don't know what you are doing, especially when working with multiple versions of a folder such as one might with a USB drive. OS X also doesn't have the wonderful offline folder sync that the pro versions of Windows have.

For work, its a very close call, and one that I can make because the applications I depend on exist on both platforms. Many users won't have that option, just as I don't have the option of Linux because of the lack of genuine MS Office and the resultant document compatibility issues.