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September 29, 2004

How the other half lives: Moving up to the G5

G5_logo.jpgMy new G5 came today; I've only just scratched the surface so far, but I'm pleased and impressed.

The coolest thing was probably Apple's new transfer utility that moves files and applications over from one machine to another. I expected this to be fairly hit or miss, with problems with licensing, purchased iTunes music, and who knows what else, but it went very smoothly.

Essentially, you mount the old Mac as a FireWire disk (hold down 'T' at startup), and the program copies over your applications, documents, and preferences.

Microsoft Office came over without a hiccup. My purchased iTunes music came over without a hiccup, just asking me to enter my iTunes ID the first time I played one. It asked me which user accounts to migrate, and moved them over without a hitch.

The only slight problems I saw were with Circus Ponies' Notebook, which somehow builds a key based on hardware, so I had to re-enter my registration key to regenerate, and with Stuffit Expander, which failed the first time I tried to unstuff anything. I downloaded the new version, release 9, and all has been well ever since.

In a way, the smooth migration is a little bit of a problem: Instead of having a few days to evolve your work process over, you spend an hour with the machines tethered, and your new machine is a clone of your old. I'm almost scared to turn the PowerBook on, lest I launch a war for control of my data, and I haven't really decided who's boss yet.

Looks like around 3.5 hours per unit on Seti@Home, which I doubt is multi-processor aware (yes it is: 'top' shows it using up to 178% of processor time), and an XBench score between 215 and 220 (the PowerBook -- 12" 867 -- is about an 85). Haven't burned a DVD yet, or gotten into iMovie, but I can't wait.

September 29, 2004 in Apple - Desktops | Permalink

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