So the new Mac Pro is all set up and running. Actually, that was the case almost immediately; as one might expect from Apple these days, the computer came out of the box ready to roll, not a problem in the world. Given that I have a .Mac account, my address book, calendar, bookmarks, and the like were quickly synchronized and on the new machine. I had decided not to use the Migration Assistant since I was going from a G5 to an Intel computer; I did it all manually.
Which was simple; documents copied right over (nice and fast over gigabit Ethernet), and most applications just copied over. A few I had to re-install, and some of the music software (copy protected as a rule) required reauthorization and all that. A minor headache with SoundSoap, nothing that couldn’t be solved with an email to the company and a fix. (My email had changed since I registered it, and the authorization server didn’t like that at all.) All in all, the main process took only a few hours (thanks to keeping my huge music library on an external drive, so no copying was necessary.) Then a few days here and there for mopup operations.
It’s spectacularly quiet, fast as all get-out, and running everything just as well as I could possibly hope. There have been no crashes, kernel panics, etc. Not a squawk or a squeak or anything like that, in fact.
It’s also — get this — entirely Microsoft-free as a Macinsoh. I can boot up a copy of Windows XP via Parallels for dealing with my own eartraining software or if I absolutely MUST have MS Word (less and less the case these days) but that’s the only situation in which there is any MS software on the computer; locked away on a virtual hard drive, where it belongs.