~pperalta

I switched to the Mac and OS X soon after joining Tangosol. I’ve been very happy with OS X as it has the best of both worlds: the support of a mainstream OS (for peripherals such as the iPhone) along with the power of the Unix shell, and it looks good to boot. After running on a MacBook Pro for for 2 1/2 years, I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a new 15″ MBP at work. I was happy with the old MBP; the biggest (insurmountable) problem was that I had maxed out on 3GB of ram. Trying to run IDEA, Firefox, Parallels, and a bunch of other apps on 3GB doesn’t work very well.

As is always the case when getting new hardware, I had the daunting task of moving everything over to the new machine and setting it up to my liking. In an attempt to save myself a week of work, I decided to try out restoring my account and apps via Migration Assistant and Time Machine. I was a bit hesitant as I previously did an upgrade to Leopard from Tiger (instead of a fresh install, as I was then also trying to save time) but I figured that I didn’t have much to lose. If it didn’t work, I could just reinstall OS X on the new Mac and start over.

I’ve been running on the new machine for a few days now, and so far things seem to be working well. I did run into a few glitches that I was able to overcome:

• Reinstalls of Parallels and the Cisco VPN client were required, I suspect this was the case because these apps require kernel extensions of some sort.
• Java 6 was nowhere to be found which I thought was strange (doesn’t Java 6 ship OOTB with Leopard?) I installed the Java package from the DVD and also did a software update; this included a Java update which included Java 6.
• The biggest challenge I encountered: when bringing up the screensaver options in the System Preferences app, it would spin up to 100% CPU and require a hard kill from the Activity Monitor. I noticed some messages in the Console about some deprecated API, so my first attempt to fix this issue was to follow the instructions in this thread. This did remove the warnings from the console, but the lockups continued. After reading this thread I decided to try installing iLife Support 9.0.3; this ended up fixing the problem for good.

So far I have to say that the effort has been worth it. Fixing the glitches above took far less time than reinstalling everything, and all of my preferences and settings migrated over with no problem (saved passwords via keychain, OS and network settings, etc.)