Switching From an Older MacBook Pro to a Newer MacBook Pro
September 24, 2008 by Ross McKillop
Well my MacBook Pro reached the 2-year-old mark and it was starting to show its age a bit, I use it near 24 hours a day, it’s always doing something… downloading, ripping, encoding, you name it! I have it set to never go to sleep.
In all that time it has never had a hiccup. The battery is in need of a replacement, it’s at about half of it’s original capacity which is not bad for a machine that has seen as much run-time as this one has.
I would actually still be using it but lately my trusty MacBook Pro has been letting me know to ease up a bit, I have been experiencing some annoying video card artifacts when I push it to the limit graphically speaking that is. This seems to only happen when I do my Screen Cast recording or other heavy duty video related work. I get these periodic and random horizontal lines in the video and as you can imagine this is not good when I am trying to record to print for my new Mac Video Training videos. It only happens when things heat up, if I start on a fairly cold Mac I can work for a while with no problems but as I said my MacBook Pro is usually working away so it stays pretty warm most of the time… Worst of all I didn’t get Apple Care which would have covered the battery and screen issue so for now resolving this issue would not be economically viable.
My previous MacBook Pro was the last generation Intel Core Duo (Not the Core 2 Duo) running at 2GHz. I had maxed it out to the 2GB of RAM limit and also upgraded the internal 80GB hard drive to a 160GB drive. The video card was an ATI Radeon with 128MB of VRAM. My older MacBook Pro did not have a FireWire 800 port, the Dual Layer DVD burner or the 802.11n capabilities (but rather a 1 FireWire 400, Single Layer Super Drive and 802.11b,g)
Now for the new machine… I decided to get the top of the line 15 inch MacBook Pro, it comes standard with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT video card with 512MB of VRAM, FireWire 800, a Dual Layer Super Drive, LED backlit screen and the faster 802.11n wireless card. I did decide to upgrade the ram to the maximum 4GB, it had to be done.
Out of the box the difference between the two is almost underwhelming! They pretty much look identical and it made me wonder why I had just spent so much on my new MacBook Pro? A quick read of the specification on the new MacBook Pro box brought me back to reality. I guess the best part about both machines looking the same is the fact that I get less questioning from the wife about why I need a new machine!
My first step was to take the 2GB RAM chip out of my old MacBook Pro (yes a single 2GB chip bought as a deal a while back) and replace it with two single 1GB chips form the new MacBook Pro, I then took the older 2GB chip along with a newly acquired 2GB chip and loaded them into my new power-plant making a total of 4GB of RAM 
I started up the old MacBook Pro in Target Disk Mode (holding the “T” key on boot-up), plugged a 6 pin to 6 pin FireWire cable into both Macbook Pros and then started the my MacBook Pro up for the first time. The familiar welcome screen did it’s thing, bin there-done that, and then the migration assistant came up asking me if I would like to transfer my data from another Mac? Why yes, thank-you very much! Since I was already connected via FireWire the next few connection steps where completed rather quickly. I then selected the Accounts, Data and Applications I wanted to transfer (most everything) and began the 100GB+ migration. This took about 3 hours which is about right but what bothered me was the last two minutes, or should I say the projected last two minutes that actually took about 1 hour in reality. It was like the Mac new it underestimated the time but did not want to admit to it and so it stayed at 2 minutes for what seemed an eternity and me like an idiot sitting there for most of it watching and waiting…
With the transfer done it was time to see what a few “G’s” got me. There was no doubt about it, she was a fast machine! Noticeably faster on boot-up, Internet (WiFi “n” made a big difference) My Virtual Windows via VMware Fusion was significantly faster all around. Stuff that is not so much speed related that I rather like is the brightness and whiteness of the new LED screen, I have an external monitor that I connect to for split screen office work that my old MacBook Pro used to be dimmer than, the new Mac Book Pro was actually much brighter and whiter than not only the older MacBook Pro but also the external screen! I also love the fact that the new LED screen is instantly on full bright, no warm up required. My new 250GB drive has lots of room so I can start jamming it full as per usual. I almost forgot the new touchpad capabilities, Zooming, Rotating and Swiping - very cool, I use the 3 finger swipe feature to navigate backwards and forwards in web-browsers.
I have an Airport Extreme with a 1TB external AirDisk connected to it that I use as a Time Capsule for my other Macs at home, I had not taken my older MacBook Pro over to the network based Time Machine as the 100GB+ backup over wireless “g” would have taken forever to do that first backup so I used an external drive for my TM backups. Once everything was all updated and setup I decided to do the big Time Machine Time Capsule setup and so it began, 118GB of data started backing-up to my AirDisk. It took about 20 hours and this was all done over WiFi. Time Machine backups are working perfectly now, I don’t even notice when they are happening to be totally honest.
The move from a MacBook Pro to a MacBook Pro is not a drastic one as I was more than happy with my previous computer setup minus the video card issue, I hope to get more of a chance to test the 512MB of video ram, Dual Layer DVD burner and FireWire 800 port down the road. All in all I am very happy with my new MacBook Pro but I think this time I may just get the Apple Care…
3 finger swipe in “web-browserS”?
Only works in Safari for me. Not for firefox. What other browser are you using?
Though I didn’t write the tutorial, I’m guessing Opera and/or Camino support it. That’s just a guess. I do know that with MultiClutch you can add that feature to Firefox.