Aviva watched my laptop spin yet another beachball of doom and told me to get a new, more powerful laptop.  I don’t have to be told twice!

So I made an appointment and bought new computers for Aviva and I.  She got a 20″ iMac, I got a new MacBook Pro 15″.

When I finally had time to install the computers, I found that they had provided the wrong FireWire cables – I needed a 6 pin FW400 connector to a new MacBook Pro 4 pin FW800 connector.  The local Apple Store was out, but they called around and found a couple at the local Fry’s – now that’s customer service!

The last time I upgraded, the setup assistant didn’t do a very good job of copying “me” over to the new laptop.  So I took a slightly different course this time.

I use both Time Machine and SuperDuper! for backups – Time Machine gives me incremental restores while SuperDuper! provides a complete, bootable backup each week.

So this time I ran SuperDuper! Then, I plugged that disk into my new Mac and turned it on.  When it came time to pick what to do, I told the new Mac to restore everything from the SuperDuper! backup disk.

And it worked!  I did get an error message at the end of the restore, but it worked great!  The only custom things I needed to do was to re-apply my license for Little Snitch (which I use to reduce call-backs from software on my computer) and reinstall the printer driver for our all-in-one printer / scanner.  I also had to reset my file sharing preferences.

That was painless.