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The BIG Reason

Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.

Farewell Old Friend, Hello New Hotness

Hoorah! I finally brought my household into the 21st century. A brand new shiny iMac is blazing bright in the corner of our living room. It replaces a dual 800MHz PowerMac G4 Qucksilver that was the super hotness back in 1999 or something.

Hoorah! I finally brought my household into the 21st century. A brand new shiny iMac is blazing bright in the corner of our living room. It replaces a dual 800MHz PowerMac G4 Qucksilver that was the super hotness back in 1999 or something. Sansuri, as he is affectionately known in our house, served our family well for the 8+ years it powered our lives. He received mucho upgrades over the years as his responsibilities increased and the rolls he played in our lives evolved. With the exception of the bad processor he initially shipped with, he never gave us a lick of trouble. However, we must make way for progress! Sansuri doesn't meet the minimum system requirements of Mac OS X 10.5, and his speed disadvantage has become more noticeable over the years. I've found myself relying on the MacBook to do more and more of the heavy lifting when it comes to horsepower.

Enter yon iMac!

The new iMac (who has yet to be named) gives us roughly 10x the horsepower of Sansuri, and in an extremely quiet and relitively small package. And we only need one wire! A form factor that fits in much better with our lifestyle these days. I did have a bit of a hiccup setting her up, though. As with my recent Xbox trouble (wherein I referenced looking forward to the pleasant task of setting up the new iMac), I would be remiss in not offering up some good, old fashioned bitching. OS X's Migration Assistant is one of it's best features. It essentially allows you to move your old computer to your new computer in two or three clicks and about 45 to 90 minutes of waiting. It copies user profiles, preferences, applications, files, network settings, everything. I've probably used it 100 times with a 100% track record. Until last night. I'm really not sure what the actual deal was, but I hooked up the FireWire cable, booted Sansuri to target disk mode, and hit the go button. It ran about 10 minutes and stopped, telling me that it could not copy a file in the Adobe Illustrator CS2 application folder. I clicked continue, and the migration assistant immediately finished, obviously skipping over the 120GB if files in my home directory. I let it boot up and inspected the damage. Sure enough, all my preferences and network settings were intact, but none of my applications or files were present. I went into the user preferences and created a new user, logged in as that user and deleted the profiles pulled over from Sansuri so I could start over. I figured a permissions repair to try to fix that Illustrator file was in order, so I fired up Sansuri and ran one. When it finished, I rebooted into target disk mode and ran the Migration Assistant again. 45 minutes and zero errors later, I was in business. When I logged into my profile, I noticed that everything but our iTunes and iPhoto libraries made it. I expected this might happen. Our iPhoto and iTunes libraries live on separate hard drives, as each one exceeds the 80GB capacity of Sansuri's boot volume. A few years back, I popped a 300GB hard drive into Sansuri accommodate or iLives. I found out the long, hard way that the Migration Assistant only migrates your boot volume. It was easy enough to manually drag and drop the said libraries onto the iMac and then tell the respective applications where to look for them, but it did involve another hour of copying. I probably could have saved some time if I would have used the gigabit network rather than the FireWire connection, but it was already hooked up that way. Despite the extra 90 or so minutes and various do-overs, it was still a pleasant experience compared to the Xbox fiasco. I let all the copying happen while I slept and we were up and running first thing in the morning. Our lives and living room are much brighter now. That screen at night is big and bright.