The Ol’ Switcheroo
I have had my Powerbook (1.5Ghz G4) for almost two years now. Before then, I had not really used Macs except for doing video editing, testing websites, or opening files sent to us (at work) by clients using macs.
My laptop of choice was a Dell Inspiron 3800. When I got the Powerbook, it was a case of total abandonment. From that day on, I never really touched the Dell again. My laptop was my powerbook, and it went everywhere with me.
Today, I got a replacement in the form of a 17″ MacBookPro. It shipped from China 2 days ago and before 10:30 this morning, it was sitting on my desk sucking up all the files and settings from my Powerbook. The process of migrating my life from one computer to the other took about 2 hours. Two hours to transfer 20GB worth of music, 13GB of photos, and about 30GB of apps, settings, and other miscellaneous files that I probably didn’t even know I had on my Powerbook.
Once that was done, I was ready to dig in and get to know my new best friend. First on the list was all of my files. Everything seemed to transfer fine. Apps started like they had been installed for almost 2 years (aside from the occasional keychain update). My mail was all there, my Expose settings…it was all there. It just worked.
The first app I tried out was iPhoto. I have 7000+ images in my iPhoto library, and those all transferred without a problem. The Intel Core Duo has no problem scrolling through them quickly, applying enhancements, etc. It also seems to import (from my camera) and export (to Flickr) pictures much faster than on my Powerbook.
I even fired up my copy of Photoshop CS and it seemed to work well. I have heard horror stories of it taking forever to open and running so much slower because of its non-universal code and the need to use Rosetta. I didn’t seem to have any of those problems. Granted I don’t normally work on a Photoshop file larger than a few megabytes (10 at the most), it may be a completely different situation with larger files.
All in all, I am really enjoying the MacBookPro. The enhanced trackpad is great with its extra scrolling features, and Photo Booth is a fun little app to play around with.
Up next is an install of Apple Boot Camp and Windows XP. I have also considered using Parallels Virtualization, but haven’t decided anything definite yet.
May 12th, 2006
It wouldn’t be very Christ-like of me to be jealous of your new laptop…
I hope it will serve you well! Hopefully I’ll find myself being able to replace my Dell Insprion 6000 at some point with a 2nd Gen MacBook Pro (whenever they might come out!) :)
Glad the migration went without a hitch. It’s nice when stuff just works!