Moving Megan to a Mac

Well, after a long run with a Windows laptop, Megan finally got sick of running Windows enough to want to deal with the switchover to a Mac.

So I found a MacBook on Craigslist for $500, and moved everything over.

There's a couple of things that I didn't know how to do in the past, and gave me a bit of trouble, so I figured I'd mention them here.

Moving Firefox Profiles

Instead of using bookmarks, Megan just uses the firefox smartbar to get to all her various websites.

It never occured to me that you wouldn't use bookmarks, but because she visits the same sites over and over again, the smartbar had everything she needed - history, bookmarks (those she did have) and search results.

In order to move the smartbar information - along with bookmarks, extensions, etc - we moved the entire firefox profile.

A quick google found this helpful forum post on exactly how to do this - something that was very easy to complete. Start up Firefox, and we had the smartbar working exactly as it was on Windows.

iTunes

Well, the only other thing (other than the browser) that Meg usually uses on her computer is iTunes. Moving it was a little more difficult.

She has songs from a long time ago that she had imported from CD, songs that she downloaded from the iTunes store, songs downloaded one-by-one from the internet and songs loaded from the Amazon MP3 store.

There's a fairly simple procedure that google turned up.

Hurry up and Wait

But this procedure assumes that you can have iTunes consolidate your library. In order to do that it needs extra space to be able to copy your songs to a single folder. This takes a long time, and requires a lot of disk space (aparently its a copy not a move).

So after cleaning out lots of space from the cramped 80gb drive, we successfully copied everything over.

When we attached her iPod again, it even recognized it - and even synced just the changed songs. The only problem is that it wasn't formatted for the Mac - so we had to restore the iPod and resync all the music.

So to transfer 30gb of music, we had to copy (not move) it to a different location on the old HDD (1+ hour), then copy it over the network (1.5+ hour), then completely resync the iPod (1.5+ hour). The only necessary step (IMHO) was the network copy. So that sort of was a waste of time.

Other than that the transition seemed to be fairly easy. Goodbye to Windows in my house. Yay!

I'll update you all in a few weeks to let you know how the adjustment from Windows to Mac has gone.