[dviant]

Recently used Migration Assistant to move my users, apps, and files over from my old PowerBook to my new one (got a great deal on a refurb late-2005 model). Before doing it, I tried to find some info on problems or successes but didn't find much. Figured I'd post my experience for others who are considering using it. Bottom line is, so far so good. I've been using it for a couple days and once I ironed out a minor issue (Dreamweaver) it seems to work as advertised and I have to say I'm impressed.

I let it move everything it could from my old PowerBook (3 users running 10.4.5) to my new one which was a new install of 10.4.2. Pretty simple, took about 2 hours for about 40gb worth of stuff. Too bad I didn't have a FW800 cable. Was a bit worried that transferring from a newer system would be a problem but seemed to handle it just fine. I updated the new PowerBook to 10.4.5 immediately after transferring.

I haven't had a chance to extensively test things yet, but I haven't had to re-install anything yet or go hunting for missing items. Here's few things of note so far:

• Adobe CS1 apps started up without issue, didn't need to re-enter serial
• Quark 6.5 asked for activation upon startup, after that no issues
• Flash 8 started up without issue, didn't ask for serial
• Dreamweaver 8 started up ok, but had some problems with the internal images the app uses. Startup screen, icons were missing. Must have been a permissions issues, because after updating system and running Fix Permissions, everything seems to be ok.
• A few settings needed to be re-set... Airport settings, Font Smoothing, a few other minor things. Not sure why these prefs didn't get transferred but nothing big really.
• It also transferred everything I had in /Users/Shared

All in all it's like I did a brain transplant on my PowerBook, everything is the same just faster. It's nice not to have to dink around with re-installing everything and re-doing all my user settings. Going to be doing some design-oriented stuff tonight so that should shed light on any app problems that have been perhaps overlooked. Will report back later if I run into any other issues with the migration.

Carry on.