The wife has OK’d a laptop upgrade at Chez Kev, so I’ll soon be moving from my PowerBook G4 to a new MacBook. Although I’ve talked about a new laptop a couple of times, she was the one to suggest it it the other day. Clearly, I have the best wife in the whole world!
So, I’m currently researching OS X to OS X transfers to make sure I can pull everything I need off the PowerBook with as little trouble as possible. If anyone has done such a transfer, I’d appreciate your advice/suggestions, but here’s the resources I’m checking out so far.
My biggest concerns are (1) transferring POP email from Mail, (2) retaining my keychain, and (3) moving some third-party apps to include plist files, etc. The rest of it should go pretty smoothly, because all of my iTunes, etc live on the network.
If you have any other advice or know any good resources, please share in comments or send me a link via del.icio.us (kevincdonahue).
Wish me luck!
Setup Assistant, described in your second link, works perfectly — I’ve used it on two migrations, including one where the source PowerBook was hanging by a thread of life. Your new MacBook will work just like your old PowerBook when all is said and done; the only things you’ll need to reinstall (if you use them) will be X11 and the Developer Tools. And if your household WLAN is MAC-locked, open it up for an hour or two so you can sign on the new box.
Oh, yeah — if you used any of the tools out there to strip Intel forks out of Universal Binary-style apps and save a few MB, you’ll need to put a clean copy of the .app over top of it to get the Intel side back and make it runnable on the MacBook (and then strip the PPC fork if you like). But if you’re doing stuff like that, you’d probably thought of that already.