A POS users's prospective of Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

I'm one of those people who likes to live on the bleeding edge of technology, an early adopter if you will. I'm also one of a growing few people who use mac in a windows environment. As a personal choice, i enjoy using Mac, mainly for the user interface (except office for mac which is awful), however windows has it's place with me, particularly in my working environment which is a active directory domain, so i use a virtual machine (VMWare Fusion of course).

As an early adopter, i'm now in the sort-of-luxurious position of running Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, so i thought I'd write a little about that here.

Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard is fast. Really fast. Especially on my macbook now that it has a OCZ Vertex SSD drive in it (which by the way was the best money I've ever spent on a computer). It boots to the login screen in about 20 seconds give or take and then from the login it take 10 seconds to load up including all my little applications such as quicksilver, jing and so forth.

Another nice thing about snow leopard is the Mac Mail integration with Exchange Server 2007, where previously I've been suffering Entourage 2008 (yes i'm using that as a verb). Mail is quick, very quick, it with my 2 4GB mailboxes opens in about 5 seconds. Searching is very very fast and the rank system is handy. I was surprised that notes and tasks also integrate with exchange, i was expecting them not to. Now if only they would do that with my iPhone we'll be good.

Windows 7

Windows 7 I would have to say is definitely the finest example of an operating system that Microsoft have ever released. Like Snow Leopard, it is quick and responsive, it boots fast and it's very flexible. Having been a mac user for years it's nice to see the new taskbar - i personally cannot believe that it took Microsoft so long to do it right in the first place although no points are awarded for originality given that it's pretty much a direct knock off of the Dock in Mac.

Internet explorer 8 is fast for sure, definitely an improvement over IE7. The new Areo is pleasant and that awful sidebar thing is gone. Best of all is what they've done with windows explorer, the sidebar there is finally the way a sidebar should be and is for once slightly better than the mac alternative - hint hint apple.

Best of all our Point of Sale product, Amicus, for Fuel, Cafe's, Restaurants, Supermarkets, Retail Chains and Wholesale works a treat straight away. This included all the various devices we tried such as strip printers and the like.

I've got to say, I've been using both for a week or so now and there is no way I'd call one over the other, they're both fantastic operating systems in all the ways that matter. Obviously there are things that one does that the other doesn't do but from an over-all user prospective, I must say i'm very happy.