Mac OS X Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7

Before buying a notebook, many shoppers start with one fundamental question: Am I a Mac or a PC? Ad campaigns for Apple and Microsoft sling mud in both directions, without providing a clear picture of each platform’s pros and cons. So, we’ve put aside the hype for these two operating systems with our hands-on, head-to-head comparison of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7. Each company offers a number of fresh features that bring the two warring desktop environments close together when it comes to ease of use and raw performance. But there’s a difference between capability and execution.

For testing, we pitted a 13.3-inch Apple MacBook Pro (2.26-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce 9400M GPU, 5,400-rpm, 160GB hard drive) against an identically configured 13.3-inch Dell XPS Studio 13 so we could concentrate on the benefits and disadvantages of each operating system. We ran our standard array of performance tests on each notebook, comparing boot times, battery life, computing power, graphics performance, and a host of other factors. Consider this the ultimate OS score card.

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