Windows 7 and Snow Leopard: Better together

Lots of ink has been spilled over Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, but it doesn’t just bring improvements for OS X on your Mac – there are plenty of reasons for anyone who uses Windows 7 on a Mac to switch.

First, Snow Leopard brings with it Boot Camp 3, the third version of Apple’s Windows-on-a-Mac software. Boot Camp started life as little more than a driver package allowing for the barest Windows functionality possible, but in subsequent versions it has picked up enough new features to make running Windows on a Mac almost as slick as, well, running OS X on a Mac.

Windows 7 support

Leopard’s Boot Camp 2 would install under Windows 7, but not without spitting out some scary-looking error messages. Windows 7 rectifies that issue for both 32- and 64-bit versions.

HFS read support

OS X has included read-only support for NTFS partitions since OS X started running on Intel processors, meaning that any work you do in Windows can be accessed and read while in OS X. Up until now, though, you couldn’t read files on the OS X partition from within Windows. You’d have to create a third FAT partition that both OSes could read, or store the files on a flash or network drive.

Now, Boot Camp 3 includes HFS read support – you can access any files on the OS X partition from within Windows. This goes for all supported versions of Windows, not just 7.

Tap to Click

Now you can tap your Mac’s touchpad to click on things. Sounds like something Apple should have implemented in the first place, right? Well, if the iPhone has shown us anything, Apple is great at holding back really basic features like copy-paste, picture texting, and tap to click and then adding them years later to great fanfare.

User experience

This last feature has nothing to do with Snow Leopard, but everything to do with how Windows 7 will run on your Mac. Intel Macs hit the scene in 2006, and almost all of them have at least a dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM. They all have processors capable of running all the Aero effects. Especially with a RAM upgrade, any Intel Mac from the very first Core Duo Macbook to the latest MacBook Pros will give you an excellent Windows 7 experience.

So, you spent $29 on Snow Leopard, and you’ve got a bunch of cash leftover. You could do a lot worse than buying a copy of Windows 7 for that shiny Mac.