Consistency, Compatibility, and OS Upgrades

Last week I pointed out some of the good and bad things that Windows, BeOS, and the Mac OS had to offer. This week I am going to continue that discussion with an emphasis on ease of use and maintenance that each OS has to offer.

I also want to thank everyone who pointed out my mistake last week - I was referring to the forward button, which lets you go to the directory you were in before you clicked the "back" button.

The Mac OS has a very nice way of keeping consistent in various versions of the OS. While there have been significant changes in major revisions, such as from System 7.5.x to 8. t these changes have always been somewhat subtle (until OS X came out, that is) - things are still in the same place, and the computer still acts as it did before, so you can go on and do your work.

But with Windows things are a little bit different. Some upgrades, such as the one from Windows 95 to 98, go very easily with few problems. Other upgrades aren't quite as easy.

For example, upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 doesn't always go well. Applications don't always work as well, especially old DOS ones. Things are in different places. Want to open the device manager? Well, it looks different and is in a different place, even though it can be accessed from the same place.

And then there are drivers. There are many different types of network cards, modems, sound cards, and display cards - and the Windows CD doesn't include them all. To make things worse, certain devices only work under certain OSes. This means that upgrading Windows might kill your network connection, Internet connection, sound, or video.

The nice thing about the Mac OS is that the hardware that came with the machine is made by Apple, and it will be supported (with the exception of the floppy drives under OS X) in future versions of the Mac OS.

To be fair, most PCs are fine with Windows upgrades. But there are some that can't run certain versions of Windows at all, and home-built PCs don't always play nice with OS upgrades, either.

Also being fair, some Macs don't work well with some OS upgrades. The iMac needed a ROM update to run past OS 8.5 for example. But I do feel that the Mac OS is much smoother to upgrade than Windows.

However, I feel that application compatibility is slightly better in Windows. Windows XP, as much as I hate it, lets older applications integrate better than Mac OS X runs older Mac OS 9 applications in the Classic mode.

What disturbs me about Windows is the additional "features" that are added. Things appear in odd places. For some reason, clicking on "properties" for the user that appears at the top of the Start menu in Windows XP gives you a way to customize the Start menu, while clicking on "properties" for the My Computer icon in the Start menu gives you the System Properties window - like it should.

---

---

In Windows, when Microsoft wants to add new features, they add additional tabs or buttons. A good example of this is the System Properties box that you get when you right click "My Computer" and select properties. In Windows 98, things were fairly simple, but Windows XP introduced more buttons and a different way to access the device manager (for a consumer edition of Windows).

But the Mac OS has its share of faults, also. In Windows, you can close a window by right-clicking it while it is minimized in the taskbar and selecting close. But Mac OS X doesn't let you do that, which makes no sense to me. Mac OS X also doesn't let you change the system font and size, which can be a problem for some people who can't read the single text size that OS X gives you, or for someone who just wants a different font.

Hopefully these issues will be fixed in Jaguar.