Hi Martijn,
Glad to hear most things went smoothly.

I didn’t have any issues with printer or scanner drivers. When I plugged my Epson all in one into the iMac it simply knew what it was and all went OK. It sounds as though you might have quite an old printer though, especially if you were using an Appletalk cable with it. USB should be better and more compatible. As far as scanner drivers go, then I usually just use the built in ‘Image Capture’ app from Apple. It isn’t the best and doesn’t do OCR but I don’t do much scanning so it’s fine for my needs. You may want to look at something like VueScan.

I didn’t ‘have’ to upgrade any software either, but I did upgrade Photoshop to CS4 and a few of my other apps had the odd update, but that is one of the nice things about starting from scratch – You end up with the latest versions of everything whereas before the latest versions were Leopard or Snow Leopard only so I was getting left behind! I’m still loving iWork and the lack of a need for Microsoft Office too!

As far as the waking from sleep issue is concerned, a few people have reported such issues (http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10358520-263.html). I’m sure there will be plenty about it on the Apple Discussion boards as well.

Hope some of that helps.
Al.

Only thing I’m noticing is that it seems to have issues waking up from sleeping. It just doesn’t respond, you can hear something going on (HD spinning up I think), but nothing further… Have you experienced this?

I haven’t really looked into it thoroughly yet (= hit the messageboards). Hope it’s not a hardware thing and can/will be fixed in upgrades of the OS.

Best,
M.

Brilliant, we’ll expect to hear from you soon…. I understand your trepidation, I wasn’t looking forward to the transition either, but you’ll be glad once you’ve done it, especially with that massive 27″ iMac of yours!

Some of the new features of the Snow Leopard OS are nice too.

Al.

Cheers, M.

H Martijn
It’s best not to use Migration Assistant as that will copy over lots of old, bloated files that are PowerPC specific. Making such a big upgrade is an ideal opportunity to get rid of lots of old, unused applications and all the files that go with them and start afresh. All of the applications that you currently have will be either PowerPC only or universal binaries (will run on bth PowerPc and Intel). If you install them from fresh on your new machine, many of them will install Intel only versions, cleaning things up a bit.

To be honest it was a lot less hassle than I had imagined. I thought it would take me ages and had been dreading it and putting it off for over a year. In the end it was fine. The OS is similar enough that there isn’t really any learning associated with the upgrade. I made a few backups of the ‘old’ mac using SuperDuper! Got the new one up and running and did Software Update on it so that it was on the latest version of Snow Leopard. Hooked one of the Firewire drives with a back-up of the old Mac to the new one and then copied all of my files across (Documents, Photos, Music, Movies, e-mails etc etc.). I then installed any applications that I use from scratch. It did mean looking up all of my registration codes and downloading the latest versions of them from the web, but it wasn’t too time consuming and its good not to have a legacy of old apps that I no longer use. Things like iPhoto, Mail and iTunes rebuilt their databases themselves when I first opened them so that the old files worked with the new versions of the apps.

I upgraded photoshop to CS4 while I was at it (which wasn’t cheap!) but everything else worked fine, even some very old financial apps that I use. Once the new apps were installed it was just a matter of copying across any preferences and application support files from the back-up of the old mac to the new one so that things were set up the way that I wanted them. The preference files are found in ~/Library/Preferences or /Library/Preferences and the Application Support files are found in ~/Library/Application Support/ or /Library/Application Support. Just copying them across was enough to get things working as they had done before.

I shall keep a back-up of the old Mac for a while yet though in case I can think of anything I have failed to copy across. I haven’t copied my MySQL databases over, but I don’t think I need them as they are all now on production servers anyway. The only thing I haven’t managed to copy across yet are my ‘Actions’ from within Photoshop. I don’t seem to be able to track them down anywhere and may need to start up the old G5 to export them from within Photoshop itself?

Hope that helps… You’ll love the new Mac. I bought iWork with mine as well and I’m loving that. It’s so nice not to have Microsoft Office on my computer but it handles any office files that I throw at it really well.

Al.

As I’m using the computer more I’m realising that it is quite a bit faster than my old one and I’m enjoying some of the new features of both the OS and the iApps that come with it. Simple things like Time Machine and ‘Faces’ in iPhoto 09.

I also bought the latest iWork suite and so far I’m coping well with that without having to resort to Microsoft Office. Pages and Numbers are lovely and remind me of the days of ClarisWorks, just much slicker and with a better user interface. In comparison to Word, Pages is a joy to use.

Al.