Windows Vista vs. OS X Leopard

The big guns are lining up for the inevitable battle between Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system and the upcoming rendition of Apple's OS X, version 10.5, code-named Leopard. Valleywag shows how big-time tech writers David Pogue of the New York Times (and the great "Missing Manual" book series) and Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal -- both seemingly partial to the Mac -- see the two systems.

Pogue:

Windows Vista is beautiful. Microsoft has never taken elegance so seriously before. Discreet eye candy is partly responsible. Windows and menus cast subtle shadows. A new typeface gives the whole affair a fresh, modern feeling. Subtle animations liven up the proceedings.

If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh, well, you’re right. You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.�

Cool and innovative:

If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.

A warning:

Of course, none of this factors in the price of the new PC you’ll probably need. Vista requires a fairly modern PC, and unless you have a powerful graphics card, some of its most useful new features turn themselves off. You can download the free Vista Upgrade Advisor from Microsoft’s Web site to see if your PC will be able to handle Vista.

According to a SoftChoice survey, in fact, only 6 percent of existing corporate PCs have enough muscle to run all of Vista’s goodies. No wonder Microsoft expects that only about 5 percent of PC users will upgrade their existing computers to Vista.

Mossberg:

After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced. However, while navigation has been improved, Vista isn't a breakthrough in ease of use. Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP. Windows hasn't been given nearly as radical an overhaul as Microsoft just applied to its other big product, Office.

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple's operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.

On performance:

I tested Vista on three computers. On a new, top-of-the-line Hewlett-Packard laptop, with Vista preinstalled, it worked smoothly and quickly. It was a pleasure.

On a three-year-old H-P desktop, a Vista upgrade installed itself fine. But even though this computer had a full gigabyte of memory and what was once a high-end graphics card, Vista Ultimate reverted to the Basic user interface. And even then, it ran so slowly and unsteadily as to make the PC essentially unusable.

The third machine was a new, small Dell XPS M1210 laptop. In general, Vista ran smoothly and well on this Dell, but some operations were annoyingly slow, including creating a new message in the built-in Windows Mail program. This surprised me, because the Dell had two gigabytes of memory and a fast processor.

Goodbye, WordPad's Word compatibility (both writers note this):

The familiar WordPad program can no longer open Microsoft Word files (ironically, Apple's free built-in word processor does).