Like a dream
24·Oct·07
I’m as happy as a pig swimming in its own excrement. Why? Because the arrival of my shiny new 15” MacBook Pro has gone like a dream.
Delivery
Supposed to be delivered 31st October – actually delivered one whole week early. Huzzah!
Unpacking
Always a treat, I’ll never tire of unpacking an Apple product, and this one hasn’t failed me either. I only wish I’d had my camera handy!
Migration
I was unsure how to tackle migrating the data from my old G5. I’d heard Migration Assistant (in /Applications/Utilities) would be the way to go, but I half fancied doing a bootable install from my SuperDuper-powered external Firewire HD clone instead.
However, doing that would require a total disk restore, which would mean I’d lose Photo Booth, iWork 08 and iLife 08, etc – any new apps that I didn’t have on the G5 basically.
I gave Migration Assistant a shot – painless. Simply stick the G5 in target disk mode (restart and hold down the ‘T’ key) and watch it fly. About an hour or so later and a quick reboot, my entire system was all there and ready to go.
The brilliance is that any apps that are newer (for instance iPhoto 08 – I have 06 on the old G5) are still there, with backups made of the older app (in a folder labelled “from old Mac”). Genius.
Parallels
One major reason I needed a MacBook Pro (or indeed any Intel Mac) was for Parallels, purely for testing of websites in PC browsers. I’ve endured Virtual PC 7 for 3 years now and don’t feel I deserve to be treated so badly anymore.
A quick purchase of Parallels Desktop for Mac ensued, only for it to occur to me that I don’t have a separate copy of Windows XP to install onto it. The fully-licenced version that installs as part of Virtual PC is buried within the VPC install procedure.
Hmm…
Then I remembered that each virtual machine is actually stored on the G5 as a single bootable disk image (within /Documents/Virtual PC List). Surely I can’t just use the Parallels Transporter to grab that image over Firewire (I considered using the network too, either would have been fine)?
Well blow me down – 20 minutes later I have an exact bootable clone of my Windows XP virtual machine, right there on my new MacBook Pro running under Parallels! I’m speechless, still.
Internet Connection minor woes
The only issue I had was internet connection – I had to go into Network preferences in the Mac and ensure that the 2 new network adapters were showing and lit green (they were, but only once I’d visited the pref settings). I also had to then open up the preferences for the virtual machine in Parallels, ‘add’ a network adapter to the list (by default it just showed hard drive and CD-ROM) and then choose to let it set up automatically. Bingo!
Activation for the nation
Oh, and you’re forced to activate Windows. Again. No big deal though.
And I am now one happy bunny.
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