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Is Snow Leopard more stable than Windows 7?

G

gunraidan

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 10, 2009
176
0
I don't mean to start an inevitable crap fest, but I've always wondered this. I've noticed that my Mac is very stable but I've moved straight from Windows XP to Leopard and never really moved onto Windows 7.

I never really thought that there was a big difference until I saw this press release.

"Portal (with the same code base across platforms, just different compilers) is one fifth as likely to crash on a Mac than on Windows. "

Are Macs really that much more, on average, more stable than PC's with Windows?

Are there any crash test or stability tests for comparison?
 
Since people use their computers for a wide variety of different things, you are going to get a wide variety of answers.

I find Snow Leopard to crash or hang less often on Apple hardware than Windows 7. Having said that, Windows 7 is also very stable for me.
 
I have Windows 7 on a budget consumer laptop and haven't had any problems with it so far. Haven't really used Snow Leopard extensively, however so I can't comment on it.
 
That article is actually pretty wrong.

The code for the game is the same. But the engine is running on a whole different platform.
The engine (which runs the game) has been written for OpenGL. It is not just a different compiler. :rolleyes:

Also it is an early version. Valve just released their port a few days ago, so there are bound to be a few issues which they have not found. Give it some time and it will be as stable as the PC version. Portal for windows has been out since 2007, plenty of time to get it stable.

ALSO, Apple is quite behind with video card drivers. There really has never been a major need for decent video card drivers as gaming was not a big thing on a mac. Again give this a bit more time and you will see a big update here as well. THis should help with performance and stability.


Any ways to answer your main question... Yes and No. It is kind of hard to answer.
Windows 7 is actually REALLY GOOD. But it still has lots of the old windows "issues". The Registry concept has out grown it self IMO. Then there is the case of malware/viruses etc.
OSX is a UNIX operating system. Various UNIX distributions are generally used in server environments and HAVE to be stable and running all the time.
This should sort of help you understand why OSX is more stable- with out going into detail.

Again, it varies on a case by case situation.
 
I've honestly had 0 problems with Windows 7 (and Windows Vista). Could be luck, but I don't really know... They're both working perfectly for me (via Bootcamp on my MacBook Pro). Snow Leopard seems to take a crap on me once in a while, but nothing mindblowing.
 
I'd say stability differences between SL and Windows 7 are much less pronounced than the ones between Leopard and XP/Vista. Maybe my SL is a special case, but I encountered few if any of the reported problems the OS was having (and apparently still continues to have with some users) right after its release. On average, I'd say my Windows 7 PC freezes at least 5 or 6 times per month (no BSODs yet) whereas the last time Snow Leopard froze like this was back on 10.6.0 last year.

All in all Windows 7 is several orders of magnitude more stable and crash-resistant than XP, but it still can't quite compare to Snow Leopard.
 
I don't trust Snow Leopard like I do Leopard. I've had an equal number of problems with Portal on both platforms.

There's still a belief that Windows is unstable?
 
VPrime said:
That article is actually pretty wrong.

The code for the game is the same. But the engine is running on a whole different platform.
The engine (which runs the game) has been written for OpenGL. It is not just a different compiler. :rolleyes:

Also it is an early version. Valve just released their port a few days ago, so there are bound to be a few issues which they have not found. Give it some time and it will be as stable as the PC version. Portal for windows has been out since 2007, plenty of time to get it stable.
Click to expand...

It says that OS X is more stable.




VPrime said:
Any ways to answer your main question... Yes and No. It is kind of hard to answer.
Windows 7 is actually REALLY GOOD. But it still has lots of the old windows "issues". The Registry concept has out grown it self IMO. Then there is the case of malware/viruses etc.
OSX is a UNIX operating system. Various UNIX distributions are generally used in server environments and HAVE to be stable and running all the time.
This should sort of help you understand why OSX is more stable- with out going into detail.

Again, it varies on a case by case situation.
Click to expand...

Thanks.

So OS X is more stable when it comes to high number crunching programs (I.E. Media Creation, Server Programs, etc.) I assume? What's Windows more stable for?



Eidorian said:
I've had an equal number of problems with Portal on both platforms.
Click to expand...

That's quite a feat since STEAM for OS X just came out.

Eidorian said:
There's still a belief that Windows is unstable?
Click to expand...

I never said it was, just that if it was less stable than OS X. It's widely known that Windows 7 is stable.
 
That is not true. For the Mac version they used the same already polished codebase that they used for the Windows version. The Mac version only has directx->opengl translation.
Opengl is waay back compared to DirectX. The OS X implementation of OpenGL is ancient.
 
I found both win7 and SL to be quite stable. I think SL may have an edge towards resource management. I've found windows to suffer from some memory leaks that require a reboot. I'm also frustrated by the need to reboot the computer when I install/uninstall an app in windows.

From my usage, I've found that they're probably fairly equal, but given my preference I lean towards using OSX over windows.
 
BeSweeet said:
I've honestly had 0 problems with Windows 7 (and Windows Vista). Could be luck, but I don't really know... They're both working perfectly for me (via Bootcamp on my MacBook Pro). Snow Leopard seems to take a crap on me once in a while, but nothing mindblowing.
Click to expand...

This IS luck!!
 
gunraidan said:
I don't mean to start an inevitable crap fest, but I've always wondered this. I've noticed that my Mac is very stable but I've moved straight from Windows XP to Leopard and never really moved onto Windows 7.

I never really thought that there was a big difference until I saw this press release.

"Portal (with the same code base across platforms, just different compilers) is one fifth as likely to crash on a Mac than on Windows. "

Are Macs really that much more, on average, more stable than PC's with Windows?
Click to expand...

A couple of things spring to mind:
You mention windows 7 in your title - Steam's data will refer to other versions of windows too.

Secondly, they appear to be referring to PORTAL crashing. App crash != OS crash. This snippet of info tells you nothing about which operating system is more or less stable.

I think following any of those things further than that is going to end up in massive trollbait.

As someone who uses both in anger at home and admins both at work, I have to say that Windows 7 and SL both appear to be pretty damn stable. They're both "the best so far" of their respective families in terms of stability from what I can see. I've not seen a Windows BSOD or a Mac kernel panic in a very long time that wasn't directly and irrefutably caused by a hardware fault.

I think the Mac might turn out to be a very stable gaming platform, more so than the average PC. Not because of issues with Windows stability vs. OSX stability, but because of things like driver & hardware stability - there are a lot less combinations of hardware to target on the Mac and Apple are in control of pretty much all these combinations.
 
I use my mac for just about everything I do... email, web browsing, movies, hulu, music, photos, geektooling, office and I use my windows 7 HTPC for well HTPC stuff.. mostly Hulu desktop but some web browsing and iTunes as well...

I use both pretty much every day and have been for over a year... My mac has frequent beach-balling and apps crashing (stupid flash videos crashing multiple times daily... which seems to be a recent development, it never used to happen... hmm trying to make flash undesirable apple?) whereas my windows 7 machine has not crashed once, I have not had one app crash in over a year of use, including when I was using the release candidate... it seems real solid... and it is almost always running even when im not watching it. Granted, I dont use it for a lot of different programs, and I rarely do more than one or two things at once so it really shouldn't crash.
 
Granted, I know less about Mac os X than I do windows, but I've found I need to reboot Snow Leopard more often than I need to reboot win 7. In windows 7 I can pretty much always get an app running again, but in SL not the case. I get "Can't open this application" (error number -600) and there's nothing that I know how to do to get it to run again without rebooting the machine. I've been getting the same kind of error with Finder (with a -10810 error code) etc. In either case all I can do is reboot.

That said, with windows 7 I've seen strange issues that don't go away even with a reboot, but they are more minor, they're nothing that keeps me from doing the things I normally do.

I suppose they have different kinds of stability...
 
My experience tells me that Firefox crashes more in Windows 7 than in Mac OS X. A lot more.

Windows Explorer and Finder are equal in the crash-rating.

It all depends on the applications you want to use.
 
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