Getting a new Mac (updated four places)

Since some of my operations use some computing power, professionally I use the Apple tower machine, the Mac pro. And when time came to decide whether to upgrade to the new OS Snow Leopard, I decided to do it with a new machine. Which came yesterday.

I think this is the third time I have upgraded a machine since the OS got the facility of migrating all data and settings from one machine to another automatically, with one click. I love that. I find it amazing that all my hundreds (thousands?) of settings and so on work exactly like I'm used to on the new machine, only faster. Macros and everything. In the old days you had to be a wizard to get everything to work the same on a new machine.

It was virtually glitch-free, which is impressive. So far, only a couple of color settings have been different, and it had not transferred the contents of my downloads folder for some reason. Easily fixed. (Update: the reason was, it seems, I'd updated from the Time Machine disk. It had the same name as the main disk.)

The one extra option I would like with this feature is the ability to select which data to transfer right away. Many of us have lots of data these days (for instance I have an extensive collection of art videos, you know, documentaries about women's love for each other and such), and even with Firewire 800 it took about seven hours to transfer it all. It's hard on me to be offline for seven hours.
I'd like it a little more flexible. But heck otherwise it works really well, so that's nitpicking.

It seems I may finally have to change my web site editing methods. The big Domai "site management" file created by Golive 6 took 20 minutes on my "old" machine, but it seems it takes hours on the new one, god knows why. I'll have to edit pages singly, and keep track of links manually, I guess.

The new icon view in Snow Leopard is coooooool. There's a slider at the bottom of the window which lets you change the icon size on the go, and the biggest size is huge, over 400 pixels! It's no longer an "icon", it's a big preview picture. It doesn't just look good, but for somebody working a lot with pictures, it's a godsent preview method. (Update: funny enough it works best with files which have not had a custom preview icon made by a graphics application, because otherwise Finder just uses that icon, and the resolution is not even close to what it gets it up to if it has to fetch it from the file itself. (Of course there's a little delay while it produces the big icons from the files, but with a fast machine it's not bad.))
Screenshot at biggest-icon setting (it's step-less, and very fast):


Update: one worry I had was if the new, faster machine would be more noisy than the old one. Because that's the greatest thing about the Intel Macs: they are much more quiet than the old G5 ones, and I love that so much. Whaddayaknow: the new one is even cooler and quieter! Wow.