"..from my cold dead hands.."

I've been travelling a lot lately (which partially explains the few postings here.) On my last trip to the UK, my trusty Powerbook G4, which was pushing it's 4th birthday, developed a problem with its screen - the bottom half started fo flicker intermittently. Since I was going on another two-week trip the following week, our IT department kindly agreed it needed to be replaced, and I orded a nice new MacBook Pro. The MBP arrived on Wednesday the following week. I got a little nervous at this point - should I risk migrating to the new system just before a major trip, or should I take my chances on the old one? After all, if I held the lid on the old one just right, let it warm up well, and sacrificed two chickens and a gleek, it mostly worked...

Well, I decided to power up the new MBP, and it started to take me through the initial setup - and then I was reminded about the Transition Assistant. The setup program asked me if I was transitioning from an old Mac, and took me through some simple steps to connect my old Mac via a FireWire cable. It put up a progress bar saying it was transferring all applications, files, and configuration from my old Mac to my new one. I went off and reviewed some documents, and one hour later, it said it was done. I clicked coninue, logged out and in (and significantly didn't reboot) and wham-zing, I was looking at an identical Mac. Every application I tried worked prefectly. My mail setup was exactly as I left it. My to-do system was intact. Everything I checked worked.

One hour. Identical. New machine. No upper-brain work on my part. Back to billable work.

I worked on the new machine for one day with the old machine next to it. I kept expecting a shoe to drop. "Surely", I said to myself, "some part of MS office is going to be non-working, or some other obscure third party app will flake out on me." Nope. So I stopped talking inanely talking to myself, and got back to preparing for my trip.

So, Here I am in LA, with a new and perfectly working machine, and no worries about my old machine keeling over completely while on the road.

This is exactly how I want to be treated by a computer company. Sure, it would have been nice if my old machine had lasted forever, but it's been through so many airports it has its own TSA profile. Given I needed to buy a new machine, having a no-hassle one hour clone was exactly what I needed to de-stress my preparation for the next trip. Well done Apple - put me down for this week's unabashed fanboy award.