At least at looking
backwards
Windows 7 is better at supporting ancient PCs than Snow
Leopard is at dealing with elderly Macs.
Apple’s Snow Leopard will only
be supported on Intel CPUs which means that users who want to use the white
spotted beast will have to upgrade. This is not the case of PCs which used to
run Windows in 2001 some of which will run Windows 7.
PC World did some
testing and found that Windows 7 will run on a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM,
and 16GB of free hard disk space.A lot of machines out there will run this
spec, even if they will not perform all the eye candy that Windows 7 users
can otherwise have. But the machine they used was an Intel P3 933 MHz
processor, 768 MB of RAM, and an 80GB hard disk which was made in 2001 which
is not too bad. It was less useful at recognising older graphics cards.
Performance was not that great but it was usable.
However it is looking
like Snow Leopard is another trap to force Apple users to buy new machines.
As the old Power chips will not like the Intel flavour of Snow
Leopard. In pre-financial crisis days this was good. Because Apple could be
guaranteed to make additional sales. However it is questionable now
whether Apple users will be able to afford any new machines.
It might be
that Snow Leopard might end up gathering dust on the shelves because of
this.