(By the way, thanks to the laptop's nice design, it was very easy to swap out the hard drives with the help of a small Phillips-head screwdriver and a tiny torx wrench. Alternately, in real life, you can have both operating systems on one hard drive by running Boot Camp Assistant from within Snow Leopard to create a new partition for Windows. The computer can be transformed from a Mac to a PC and the other way around just by swapping out the hard drives. I got a new hard drive so each operating system would have a hard drive of its own, with only one partition. These two hard drives have virtually the same specs, supporting a SATA 3Gbps interface, having 8MB of cache memory, and spinning at 5,400rpm. I chose Windows 7 64-bit as Apple claims Snow Leopard is now a pure 64-bit OS with most of its built-in applications being constructed with 64-bit code. Windows 7 64-bit is installed on a 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue (model WD3200BEVT). Mac OS X Snow Leopard is installed on the stock 320GB hard drive (a Hitachi model HTS543232L9SA0). (This is not the latest 2009 model that comes with a nonremovable battery, which packs a lot more juice.) This is the 2008 model of the computer that comes with a removable battery and doesn't have the SD card slot. ( Editors' note: This jury is still out on this one.) It's easy to replace the MacBook Pro's hard drive.įirst off, the test machine is a 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and a 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT video card. (Read CNET's official reviews of Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.) Second, by talking about all this in such detail, I will seem much nerdier than I actually am. First, the testing described in this article is somewhat anecdotal as it was performed on only one computer and, to some extent, was conducted differently from how we generally test computers for CNET reviews. It's important, however, to note two things. There's no rocket science involved here all you need is a good stopwatch, a MacBook Pro, and a lot of time. However, Boot Camp also contains drivers for Apple's proprietary hardware including the iSight Webcam, keyboard backlight, and multitouch mouse pad, and therefore it's best to get this bundle instead of looking for drivers individually.įor the sake of transparency (I know a lot of you feel passionately about one operating system or the other), I will disclose how I conducted my testing so you can duplicate it if you want. As a matter of fact, you can get most of these drivers from the components' manufacturers (or via Windows update). These drivers include chipset, video, networking, and so on. Just to clarify, Boot Camp is not a virtual environment but simply a bundle of native Windows drivers-software that makes the OS work properly with hardware components. Furthermore, Boot Camp 3.0 seemed to make Windows run better than ever on a Mac. The right time seems to be now, as Snow Leopard has been out for a while and has even been updated to 10.6.1, and Windows 7 has been at the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) vendors for almost three months and has also had a few updates. Snow Leopard consistently beats Windows 7 in many general performance areas.Īs someone who uses both platforms for work and personal entertainment, I've been wanting to do a performance comparison between Windows 7 and Mac OS X since I first got my hands on the Windows 7 RTM (the final build of the OS) more than two months ago, but decided to wait until I could compare the two apples to apples.
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