Flashes of Panic

While transfer of affection isn’t easy, it turns out that transfer of almost everything else is alarmingly easy. When the new box was starting up, it asked me if I was transferring from an old Mac. I said yes, booted the old machine in Firewire Target Disk Mode, plugged it in to the new one… and waited for a few hours.

Once it was done, though, I’ve found very little from my old machine which is missing on the new one. I was able to log in and start working like I hadn’t switched machines. (A asked, and I didn’t have an answer: is there a comparable transfer utility for Windows? I don’t remember one when I was setting up XP boxen in my old job—not one that worked this well, anyway.)

The only hitches I’ve found are connected to the fact that I was switching from a PowerPC G4 to an Intel chip. So there’s, uh, an architecture issue. Most of my apps were already Universal, but every so often I bump up on something compiled for PPC. The list is pretty bizarre. TeXshop worked, but wouldn’t generate a PDF—the LaTeX utilities underneath needed rebuilding. My G4 Bon Echo build would crash at odd times, running under Rosetta. Likewise, DrScheme would start and run, but crash if I tried defining anything.

And then, in yesterday’s class, we were talking about Just In Time architecture-to-architecture translation. Which, while obviously very good, is evidently not flawless yet.

Technorati Tags: apple, computer science, laptop