You can buy the nicest computer with the slickest components in existence, but that box of silicon chips and electrical circuits is really only as good as its operating system. Without an operating system (the name says it all—it’s a system for operating the machine, and it’s how you tell the computer what you want it to do), your computer would just be an expensive fuse.

Last year, Apple and Microsoft released OS X Leopard and Windows Vista, new versions of their respective operating systems. Both software packages are, essentially, upgrades of older operating systems. Both use a graphical user interface (GUI) as a way of providing a simple, easy-to-use, point-and-click method of operating a computer.

But that’s where the similarities end, because where Leopard is a stable, usable operating system with a few bugs, for many users Vista is a nearly unusable, unstable mess of an operating system with a few nice features.

Leopard, the sixth version of Apple’s OS X operating system since the software was introduced in 2001, was released in October. While Apple claims that there are over 300 new features in Leopard, Time Machine alone makes Leopard an essential upgrade for Apple users. Time Machine is a utility that simplifies and automates the process of making backups of your computer. Need to recover a file you deleted last week? With Time Machine, you can actually see what your computer looked like back then, and with one click you can restore the file.

Time Machine is only as good as the size of your backup hard drive, the volume of things you want archived, and the frequency with which you make changes to the files on your computer. If your user directory contains 10 gigabytes of data, for example, and you have a 500-gigabyte hard drive set aside for Time Machine to write to, the system will be able to log about two months’ worth of changes that you can go back to. But any backup is better than no backup at all.

Other features that make Leopard a worthwhile upgrade include Stacks and Spaces, which provide users with more control over the organization and layout of the desktop, and an implementation of the “cover flow” feature from iTunes in the Finder, which gives you the ability to quickly preview documents and files without opening the application they were created with.

Leopard is not without its problems. There have been issues with drivers for some older peripherals, some of which have been resolved, but be prepared to discover that your aging printer doesn’t interface very well. On my PowerPC, Leopard also feels a bit sluggish compared to how it runs on the newer Intel-based Apple computers.

For this you can thank our disposable culture, and the pace at which technology is changing. A two-year-old computer used to be simply slower than a new one, but today that old computer isn’t just slow, it’s archaic.

The need to have a new computer in order to run an operating system is one reason Microsoft’s Windows Vista is so problematic. Despite many complaints about the functionality of Windows Vista, my testing showed that it works just fine. But I was using a powerful, tricked-out, $6,000 computer at the time (the HP Blackbird, built by Calgary’s Voodoo; more on it soon).

Bill Gates’s apocryphal quip that “Sixteen-K should be enough for everyone” has become a joke in this era of cheap memory and bigger computer capacities. That Gates went on to unleash Windows, which requires a lot of memory, on an unsuspecting public is even funnier.

For years, Microsoft has been trying to find a way to make a quantum leap with its operating system, but because Windows is so ubiquitous, the company has ultimately been forced to release software that has backwards compatibility with the last three or four versions, and that in itself causes problems. Microsoft brought the problem on itself by becoming the standard in the first place, and then developing a reputation for shipping software that wasn’t ready for
release, and required endless service packs to get it to be stable. There’s a reason why only technology reporters and computer geeks are early adopters of new editions of Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft also has a more difficult job, because Windows must work with a myriad of computer configurations. Apple computers are all the same; Windows boxes come in more varieties than there are species of insects in the animal kingdom. Every configuration presents an opportunity for a hardware conflict. Every different peripheral manufacturer is a chance for a driver to throw a wrench into the gears.

It’s not that Microsoft programmers and developers are trying to make a bad operating system. Vista was constructed to integrate a number of programs that we once had to purchase and load separately—Media Center being the most significant; this is intended to make things simpler for users. Vista also has its own built-in backup utility. When you get Vista running on that new, tricked-out computer, you’ll find some nice enhancements.

The Start menu has been neatly reorganized, and Vista is built around users’ behaviour, rather than specific tasks. So instead of having to remember that adding new users to the system is a subset of the Control Panel group of utilities, you look for the Add New Users prompt. That thinking extends to the task bar that appears at the top of a Windows Explorer window. The tasks listed in the Command Bar are contextually relevant to the files in the folder, so if you’re looking at a folder of photos, you can share, burn, or edit them with one click on the Command Bar. I’m also a big fan of how the address bar in Windows Explorer mimics the bread-crumb trail of Internet browsers, since it’s far easier to navigate through a filing system that way.

Vista was also built with a number of visual upgrades—including enhanced 3-D animations and smoothing for graphics—that make the operating system look nicer but are also a major reason that so many have had problems running it. Nice graphics are great, but you need a high-end video card to make the experience worthwhile. In the meantime, PC users should wait until they have a speedy new computer before making the move to Vista.