From 600MHz iMac G3 to 2GHz iMac G5
I've spent the past week setting up my new iMac
G5. iBlog is not yet moved over properly.
On Monday morning my DSL connection went down and
(thanks to Verizon) it stayed down for three days. My new iMac G5 arrived via
FedEx late on Tuesday, a day ahead of the initial
estimate.
I took the iMac G5, the
wireless keyboard and mouse, 6 batteries and the power cord out of the box and
removed all the plastic wrap. Paying no attention to any written instructions,
I put the batteries in the keyboard and mouse. I plugged the power cord into
the back of the monitor/computer and into the wall socket. I touched the on
button and the iMac came alive. I did not want to transfer everything
automatically from my old G3 iMac to the new machine; so I did the minimal setup
to create my user account. When the machine was basically ready to use, I shut
it down, turned it face down on the table, loosened 3 screws and removed the
back of the case. I removed the 512MB of standard RAM and installed 2 1GB DDR
PC3200 DIMMs. I put the case back together and powered up the machine for the
second time.
The old iMac was connected
to the DSL router, but that was useless. I used its internal 56k modem to
connect to the internet and I configured it as a wireless (Airport) base station
through which the new iMac can access the internet. So for the first couple of
days my fast new iMac was talking to the internet via a slow modem connection.
The new iMac came with Mac OS X (Tiger) 10.4 preinstalled, but there was already
a 10.4.1 upgrade that would have to wait until the fast DSL connection was
available again.
In the meantime I had
numerous application programs on the old Mac that I wanted on the new Mac. So I
mounted the old Mac as a remote file server via my wireless connection and with
its hard drives displayed on the desktop of the new Mac, transferring files was
a matter of dragging and dropping. Unfortunately, many applications are
scattered around a bit, with preference files in one place, the executable in
another, and support files in yet another
place.
One of the tricky cases was
transferring my iTunes music library. I needed to search the web for advice on
how to do that. It turned out to be fairly easy. I launched iTunes on my new
Mac and opened the Preferences window and went to the Advanced options. There I
set "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" and "Keep iTunes
Music folder organized". I then opened the empty Library window. I navigated
to the iTunes Music folder on my old Mac and dragged it into the empty Library
window. iTunes began copying all the old files into my new iTunes library.
Since I have a few songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store, I deauthorized
the old Mac and authorized the new
one.
My mail was transferred easily by
just dragging and dropping the mail folder from one machine to the other.
Similarly, my Quicken database was easily transferred. Some data, such as my
Address Book contact list, was transferred by simply syncing both Macs with my
.Mac account. In other cases I installed fresh copies of applications on my new
Mac from their original CDs. Thus far the process has gone fairly
smoothly.
Posted: Saturday - May 28, 2005 at 02:03 AM