First Up: The Graphical User Interface
(Otherwise known as the GUI, or plainly, the interface.) After a clean installation of Leopard, I was greeted with a marvelous background reminiscent of the Northern Lights. There were no icons on the desktop, which made the first boot up have a crisp clean feeling, in contrast to my cluttered desktop in Windows XP. I also must say that, in contrast to the old Mac Dock, (that thing in the bottom of the screen that holds icons) this new dock is much prettier, and doesn't make you pull out your hair in frustration. The new dock, instead of making the icon bounce up, and down, and up, and down whenever you click on something, makes the icon bounce once. Whenever I see the icon bounce, I always laugh, because it looks exactly like a rabbit bouncing around. (This is just my view on the dock.)
This experience with Vista was not quite as smooth. From when I first booted up, the icons on my desktop were VERY good looking. (Especially the trash can.) The start menu, however, was, in my opinion, very poorly designed. First of all, if you click on the "all programs" part of the Windows XP start menu, the screen is flooded with all the programs. This new Vista start menu packs it all into one tiny little strip within the start menu, making it VERY hard to read. Secondly, who wants to click on a start menu icon that is only a small circle? I find that very annoying. The search on the start menu, however, is very intuitive and provides an easy-access place to find all of your files. However, the overall gloss of the black windows made it feel to tacky, which made the entire experience very poor.
Next Up: Usability
Everyone knows of how great Windows is for work, but is Mac finally ready to take on Windows with usability? I don't think so. Although the new Mac operating system has a lot of cool special effects and good looking windows and interface, nothing new that is included in the new Mac operating system is good. Nothing. The new dock incorporates this cool new mirrored effect that mirrors everything over it. Cool? Yes. Better for work? Not at all. The widgets are very fun to play with, but are there any ones that actually help you with your work and daily life? Nope. The newly redesigned finder is very cool, but does it really help with looking up files and folders? No, the new "My Computer" in Vista trumps this. With Vista, there are numerous things that do help, especially with school work.
Let's say that you are doing a report on lions. If you search the computer and the internet for "lions," Vista automatically creates a "virtual folder," so that you do not have to drag and drop everything you want into a newly created folder. Vista does it for you. Now, you have a folder jam-packed with information on Lions. Wow.
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Programs
Windows has many programs. Mac does not. In fact, Macs have less programs than another operating system group called Linux, which I personally use. Give it a search on google, and read up on Linux. (PS- once you know enough on Linux, and know what a Linux Distribution is, the best one is openSUSE, in my opinion. It even trumps Ubuntu!) Windows has so many programs, even more than the amount of words in every book in the WMS school library and the Wellesley free library combined! That's a lot!
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Finally: Performance
Both systems performed VERY well, but Windows Vista had a definite win. The bootup time was amazing, trailing speeds of a bootup of 10 seconds. Macs bootup was about 30 seconds. Running programs on Leopard, however, easily beat Windows Vista. Vista took 5 seconds to load up Internet Explorer 7, it's web browser. Mac took 2 seconds to load up Safari, it's web browser. Overall, Vista was a lot faster.
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Final score: Vista: 3 Mac:1
Although all the operating systems were a brilliantly refreshing alternate to their predecessors, Windows Vista proved triumphant over Mac Leopard because of the many new features it integrates, and the wealth of applications that it offers.
