So Great It's Like Magic

Jan 12, 2008 at 10:45 AM
7 comments

Do you know about Migration Assistant? If you have an old Mac and you buy a new one, you can hook a cable between the two machines and all your settings, apps, documents, music, etc are sent onto the new computer in a perfect copy. It's really quite wonderful.

And it's not only for new Macs, as I recently learned.

Recently Sarah and I decided to trade computers so I could work more effectively. (her computer is newer, can run windows, and has a microphone, which I will need in my new job) And think about that for a second - what if someone wanted to trade computers with you? What would you do?

Most people would do their best to back up their data, then wipe both machines and bring the data back on. Which takes a long time, and I personally always forget something, like unix command line utilities.

But with Migration Assistant, I could just hook the two machines up, wait several hours for each transfer of files, then reboot and presto. Sarah's desktop looked exactly the same on my old computer, and mine looked exactly the same on Sarah's old computer.

Like magic.

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So, Jon, I am thinking about buying a new laptop, and I'm leaning towards a Mac. The thing that worries me is how PC-reliant I am in terms of interfacing with my workplace environment and the rest of the world. I see people running into issues with this very regularly at work- someone sends themselves a document to print from their mac, and they can't open it on our PC's, etc. etc. Do you have any words to console me about these issues? I figured you were the guy to ask.

In the past, my answer would be more of a "the benefits outweigh the drawbacks" kind of answer. I'd say you could contact me any time for help, and I'd know within a few months you'd be all set.

But now Macs can run Windows. So I know several people (even at Microsoft!) who buy Macs and run Windows 95% of the time. I know even more people that do 50/50 for a while, but within a few months they're 100% Mac.

So, bottom line: as long as you factor in the price of buying a copy of Windows with your Mac, you can always have a Windows safety net if you need it. Let me know if you have any other questions/concerns.

Great answer! I'm 75% decided. Now it's just a money thang, basically. When you say that they do Windows 50/50, how does that work? Can you have two operating systems installed on the same computer? I'm showing my ignorance here because I feel safe with you. :)

Yup, it's a really cool feature called <a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bootcamp.html">Boot Camp</a>.

When you boot the machine, you can <a href="http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/1695/036zq.jpg">pick which OS you want</a>. It's just that simple.

If you want to start getting fancy, you can actually run Mac and Windows at the same time. That's what I do at work and it's stunning.. Check out this video of

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIApJMzGzDQ">Mac and Windows on one screen</a>.

Bah! All my links broke.

Boot Camp info:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bootcamp.html

Picking your OS:

http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/1695/036zq.jpg

Cool youtube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIApJMzGzDQ

I'll check it out. You're amazing, Jon. Thanks.

You know what else Migration Assistant can do? Pull a profile from a Time Machine backup. If, say, you were replacing your wife's computer's hard drive with a larger one and had just performed a backup before pulling the old one out.

So Great It's Like Magic

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