Snow Leopard vs Windows 7: How the Apple has fallen

So you've bought your computer and you're not happy with the out-of-the-box experience -- you want to tweak things a little. With Snow Leopard, this is fairly straightforward, particularly if you've used Leopard. Configuration options in the System Preferences span four categories: personal, hardware, Internet and wireless, and system -- each of which has its own sub category.

Windows 7's configuration mechanism, Control Panel, is less elegant  -- even the simple, task-oriented view is baffling, as it consists of more than double the number of Snow Leopard's configuration categories. Drilling down into each category, unless you're an experienced user, will almost certainly give you brainache, such is the quantity of options and the haphazard way in which they're presented.

We're grateful though, that Windows 7 provides the opportunity to tweak these options in the first place, rather than dumbing things down down and handling us with kid gloves. It provides options Snow Leopard can only dream of, including a wealth of power options that let you select the intensity of laptop LEDs, the ability to suspend USB ports, and whether the computer is allowed to sleep while sharing media. Try specifying these options in Snow Leopard, and it'll ruffle your hair and tell you not to worry your pretty little head about it.

Many will argue they'd rather not be presented with half a million options for tweaking their OS, and that Snow Leopard actually needs less configuration to get results. We disagree. Windows 7 is, to all intents and purposes, 'fully baked' out of the box, and inexperienced users can get by without ever opening the Control Panel. Inevitably, however, as the user grows more confident and willing to tweak, there's only one operating system that'll satisfy that geek urge to fiddle, and that's Windows 7.

Mac or PC: PC takes this round with (relative) ease.