While many a story that finds its way over to OS Views could stand a little, um, rewriting (Roughly Drafted Mac can get annoying after a time, even for those of us who love Macs), one recent story was surprisingly balanced. Mitch Ratcliffe, writing for ZD Net, of all places, just took a look at system-to-system migration under Vista and under the Mac OS. Vista ate crow (and plenty of stuff that flows in that river on which it finds itself canoeing sans paddle), had its hat handed to it, and did get hit by the door on the way out.
Ratcliffe doesn’t appear to have a bias, lest one wishes to apply that term to a preference for a good user experience. To wit, he writes the following:
Given that Windows systems depend so heavily on application software to add functionality, it is a mystery to me why migration of applications would not be a keystone of acceptable user experience for the Vista Windows Easy Transfer application
He suggests, fairly or otherwise, that this may be a money-making scheme, forcing (or at least nudging) Vista users (sorry, I had to correct an honest typo that had that as “suers") to buy a new set of applications. Ouch. Still, conspiracy theories aside, here’s what he had to say about his results:
It took almost a full day to successfully move 5.6GB of user settings and documents to a Vista system. The Mac, by contrast, took less than an hour for migration of 60+GB worth of user settings, documents, and, unlike the Windows utility, the moving of applications from an existing Mac OS X install to a new one.
I must say here that if this is the new face of a user-friendly Microsoft, someone in Redmond needs a dictionary. I’ll grant that the new look of Vista is nice enough, but between the kind of headaches Ratcliffe mentions and the easily perceptible hiccup I witnessed as Vista animated the opening of a folder on a laptop at Best Buy, well, I got my shades on hand, folks.
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