Well, I finally powered up the new Mac Pro, to replace the ancient Mac mini.

Great: Migration Assistant (via Time Machine backups) worked like a champ. I was originally worried how I'd bridge the Firewire 400 <-> Firewire 800 divide, but my TM drive had both FW400 and FW800, so the drive, itself, was the bridge. After that, and copying over all the stuff in my Bulk partition (1TB of photos, music, and videos), everything just freakin' worked. Amazing.

Beyond Great: Fast, fast, fast! Wow this thing is fast. Lightroom now feels almost as fast as Picasa! It's also remarkably quiet, compared to the Mac mini plus the two LaCie FW drives (each a 2-way stripe) I had running before. Now I just have three internal disks. Fast and quiet. [Also, remember that whole confusion about what disks to buy? Turns out that Apple's 1TB hard drive, at least in my machine, was a WD "Caviar Black" -- the same model I ordered from Amazon for my additional drives. This makes me feel at least modestly more comfortable that I did the right thing.

Annoying (1): For whatever broken fink-related reason, my /etc/ssh_host_rsa_key and friends were symlinks into /sw/etc/ssh, which didn't get copied over, even though the rest of /sw did seem to migrate just fine. That meant no ssh host keys, so sshd was very unhappy.

Annoying (2): I've managed to max out my five simultaneous iTunes authorizations over the years, despite not ever using more than one machine at a time. And, of course, the Mac mini is now powered down and disassembled. Real pain to bring it back up just to deauthorize iTunes. Instead, I tried the "deauthorize everything" thing, and it seemed to work. Amazing that vaguely copy-protected apps like Adobe Photoshop CS3 worked flawlessly, but iTunes made me jump through hoops.

Glad you are getting on well with your new Mac Pro

I've been using mine now for a couple of months (I think?) and am getting on with it great, sometimes I forget how fast this thing is it's only when I go back to use my old MacBook that I migrated from I see the speed difference.

I am also amazed how quiet it is, even under heavy load the volume doesn't seem to pick up too much. Mine tends to idle at about 50C. Overall I am happy with my choice and it was defiantly the right thing for me, I was looking at an iMac at the time. And, touch wood, I don't seem to have any bugs etc... everything is running just fine.

Cheers

Cris.

CS3 supposedly allows *two* simultaneous installations before it complains -- the idea being one on a desktop machine, and a second for the travelbook.

Cheers

I've never really bothered managing my iTunes licenses manually. If I hit the limit and need one more, I use the same reset all method. They have never given me any grief about it.

I have refused to pay for any DRM'd music. The facts that I always want the whole album, and that, in that case, there's very little savings over getting a CD by buying digital music from anyone who applies DRM, made that decision easy.

I think I've got only ten iTunes DRM tracks, purchased over the years when I needed them *right now* (for whatever reason). They might as well keep on working. Also, the iTunes DRM seems to interact in a funny way with the iPhone. My computer threatened to delete all my iPhone apps if it wasn't attached to my account.

iTunes seems to like doing that , worst piece of software that I have to use on a regular basis

As have I. The only reason I see the iTunes activation stuff is due to my iPhone apps, or TV shows. And there is still something nagging me to not buy MPEG 4 music and instead stay with MPEG 1. Maybe one day.

Maybe you've got a great music player that'll only play the former. Just a guess.

Latter.

Gah. I'm not feeling well, I have a cold and a headache today, my concentration is down.