Not so much madness actually because aside from one hiccup things went pretty smoothly.
First some comparisons:
Original Mini, first generation model from January 2005:
- 512MB RAM PC-2700 DDR SDRAM
- 40GB disk
- 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4
- ATI Radeon 9200 GPU with 32MB VRAM
- Two USB ports
- Firewire 400 port
- 10/100 Mbit ethernet
- 1 modem (remember those?) port
- Hard disk and CD/DVD drive both (P)ATA
Then in comes the new version, released three days ago (March 3, 2009):
- 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
- 320GB disk
- 2GHz Core 2 Duo
- NVIDIA GeForce 9400 with 256MB VRAM
- Five USB ports
- Firewire 800 port
- 1 Gbit ethernet
- Hard disk and CD/DVD drive both SATA
Hello mister Moore, nice to meet you again!
The migration was very smooth. We swapped keyboard/mouse/monitor a few times while we had both Minis running for this, which was almost the trickiest part. Unfortunately I didn’t have the right kind of firewire cable to connect the old and new machine or I would’ve used that, but fortunately OS X supports migrating machine via ethernet and wifi as well now, which only required installing a bit of software on the old one and setting up wifi on the new one (because of encryption) and then sit back and wait while a few GB of data is transferred between the two.
As far as I can tell almost all settings are included in this migration process, except for a few things (and if I notice more I’ll update this entry):
- The parental controls preference pane would cause system preferences to crash. I blame this on going from PPC to Intel. Nuking the contents of /Library/Application Support/Apple/ParentalControls/ and then restarting the machine appears to have taken care of that.
- The Sharing – Remote Login setting wasn’t included, so I had to re-enable it.
- I had to reenter the wifi password.
Now I wait for the kids to get home and actually put it to work with general browsing, flash games, photo booth experiments, etc. Any bets on how many days/weeks until they complain it’s too slow?