Apple’s Snow Leopard is cool, but friendlier Windows 7 cleans up

There are six flavours to pick from — six! — the only blessing, there are 32-bit and 64-bit releases.

Here is my general rule of thumb: Buy Windows 7 Home Premium and above.

Prices are at $199-plus; so it’s an expensive buy/upgrade and you are better off buying the biggest one.

If you asked me, all you need is Ultimate or Enterprise.

Anything else is a waste of time.

In this respect, Microsoft sadly chooses to mute options, wasting its engineering finesse.

By having some features in some and not in others, Windows loses its authenticity.

So you have got yourself Snow Leopard and Windows 7.

Time for the upgrades, and this is where Windows rules.

If you are coming from an XP/Vista environment, you just pop in the DVD and upgrade.

With its new improved interface, everything is easy — including fewer mouse clicks.

Snow Leopard means that you must have Leopard pre-installed; Tiger and earlier cats will not work as easily.

Windows 7 is ahead with the hardware as it will work with older machines — as far back as Pentium 4s that run XP; eight-year-old machines. Snow Leopard will only run on the new Intel-based Macs.

Both 7 and Snow Leopard have shed a lot of weight and perform even better.

Bootups and shutdows are much faster.