OSX vs Windows

I've been using windows since the day 1, and was quite disappointed in certain ways. I guess i do not have to list down everything but these are the most frustrating ones:

1. BSOD (Blue screen of death)
2. Registry
3. Virus, trojans (Malware in general)

I bought myself a MacBook (upgraded to 4gb ram for Virtual machines) on Feb 2010, and was amazed by the way Apple manage to simplify, beautify the entire OS. The most important factor to me was actually the performance. Having Spotlight to easily access any thing on your mac and with all the eye candy, it's still running super fast. I'm a very heavy user as i always run VirtualBox(2GB memory) for my development work, iMail, google chrome browser. I've yet encountered any system error till now and mac never fail to amaze me at how efficiently the entire OS is engineered with their priorities set on visual effects, ease of use and performance. I have never hesitated on downloading mail attachments or random files from the net.

The only problem i face when i switch to a Mac was, the mouse sensitivity. It was wierd to have such acceleration and sometimes when your pointer is right next to what you want to click, it seems like you are moving your mouse in sand. Well, the best solution was actually to use a (ironically) Microsoft IntelliSense mouse. After installing the drivers, you can have a mouse that accelerates like what you have on windows.

Next was the lack of MSN, i use MSN everyday and the best replacement for MSN on mac was Adium, but that didn't have the "Groups" option and i couldn't message my friends & colleagues in native MSN. I'm still hoping that Microsoft will actually release a fully featured, functional MSN for OSX.

The last thing was the File System.

A brief history of Microsoft OS:

In the past, Windows uses FAT16/FAT32, which was replaced by NTFS.

Mac uses HFS+

You might think what does that got to do with you? Well, first of all, Windows with it's gargantuan OS market share had made most people use NTFS for external HDD, that's when the problem starts, OSX have native support to read only (although you can download apps to write into NTFS), but Windows users can't read HFS+, if you use TimeMachine (Apple's backup program), you have to format the HDD to HFS+, then your HDD is officially Mac only.

It took me 4 hours trying to get the best of both worlds as i only have a 500gb HDD, i ended up with a 250GB partition with HFS+, 250GB with NTFS. And i use the HFS+ partition purely for TimeMachine back ups, and NTFS for file transfer with my Windows-using friends.

P.S. 1 major difference i found out is that HFS+ doesn't require you to defragment it (very little fragmentation) whereas NTFS requires you to do it on regularly basis.