Performance showdown: Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard | Windows 7 Insider - CNET Reviews. I think Windows 7 is supposed to be faster than Vista, but even so, Snow Leopard is so much faster than any previous Mac OS X system that I suspected it would come out on top in a test with Windows 7. And the test doesn't even measure such mundane tasks as application launch, let alone the time it takes to perform simple tasks like finding a file or application in the morass that is Window's file system and its pathetic Explorer app.