Moved to a New Macintosh

I just moved my 'main computer' from a MacBook 13" uni-body to a new MacBookPro 13". Now I can have a 'spare' in case anything happens in the future.

I'm using SuperDuper to keep a 'mirror image' of the working hard drive. If anything goes wrong, I can be back up and running very quickly.

The process to 'move' my main computer to the new one was quite simple. (So much easier than the move to a new 'Instructor' computer last week. Thank move from a Dell D630 to a Dell E6400 took over 10 hours of manual work.... whew!)

I purchased a 'spare' 500GB 7200rpm hard drive from NewEgg to be the 'main' HD for the MacBookPro. (I put the 250GB that came with it in a drawer so I can have a 'factory fresh' install whenever I like)

I put the 500GB Drive in a USB enclosure and plugged it into my MacBook Unibody 13" and ran the 'SuperDuper' program (well worth the money) and 'cloned' the internal hard drive to the new external drive. This did take a couple of hours... but no time on my part other than a couple of minutes to get it plugged in and started. I made sure to check the 'Make Disk Startup' when the copying was complete.

Then I opened the case of the new MacBookPro 13" - only needed a small phillips head screwdriver. Removed the factory HD and replaced it with the cloned 500GB HD.

Put everything back together and fired it up.

Other than a little error message that there was a duplicate name on the local area network (the Mac OS automatically made a new suffix to the computer name and moved right on past the error).

I had to do a little bit of 'tweaking' to the system preferences. First configured MobileMe preferences with my account information. Then let the 'Sync' begin. Within 10 minutes I had an identical duplicate of my origional machine.

E-mail, browser, Tweetie, Things, iTunes, etc. Everything ready and working. No more than 15 minutes of my time and the task was completed.

Done!

Soooooo much easier than the same process on a PC.

The MacBookPro is a bit faster - especially at starting up only 35 seconds from a cold boot, compared with 70 seconds on the older version. It also has a much better battery with better than 50% more juice, and not only a Firewire port, but also an SD card reader.