Usability – Act 3, Scene 2

Swords clash, sparks fly and men grunt, but the showdown ends in stalemate.

Take Vista. It has a far better user interface than XP -- the file and application search facility is vastly improved and the cascading Start menu has been banished, but it only takes a few moments of use to discover pointless idiosyncrasies.

Microsoft constantly reminds us of how great Flip 3D is, but this feature doesn't help us find the right application window much faster than Alt-Tab did. It's very time consuming when you have many application windows to flip through, and it's in no way as efficient as OS X's Exposé feature.

Vista annoys us with its questionable stability, too. Yes, it's more robust than XP, and yes, the OS itself doesn't crash very often. But the applications that run on the OS are as prone to hang as ever. If this was a real sword fight and Baron Vista's sword temporarily stopped responding, it's doubtful Count OS X would stop to let him press ctrl-alt-del.

OS X doesn't do itself many favours, though. Why, after all these years can you not resize documents or applications by clicking any corner of the window? Why does Apple subscribe to the 'mystery meat' school of navigation, where the 'minimise', 'maximise' and 'close window' buttons at the top-left of a pane all look identical until you hover over them? Why doesn't the delete key let you delete files? Why instead do we have to press the Apple plus backspace keys? Using OS X is, at times, a bit like eating in the dark.

Oh, and where are the OS X games? And why does Front Row feel like the poor, backwards relation of Windows Media Center?

We're calling this one a draw. They're just as good as each other, and in some cases just as bad -- a pox upon both your houses!

Score: Mac OS X-2, Windows Vista-2