My daughter started at university last month and so the time had come to get her her own computer. Initial discussions began last year, focussed on whether she wanted both a notebook & desktop or only a laptop. On one hand you have portabaility but the pain of synchronisation and simplicity on the other. She quickly decided on a laptop so then I raised the question of Mac or Windows; this was not so easily resolved but eventually, somewhat to my surprise, she opted for Mac. I decided to go with a MacBook Pro rather than a MacBook then with the help of MacRumors I could see that there had been a recent refresh (this was in June) so placed an order.
A couple of weeks later the laptop duly arrived, as this coincided with her going off on holiday, I had a whole week to configure and generally fiddle with it. Over the years I have set up a number of new Windows computers but this was only my second Mac. Of course, the first time around it was all trial and error but this time I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do and how to do it. Even so, I was impressed by just how straight forward it was. I began by creating an Admin account, which I linked to my MobileMe account and thus all my settings and preferences were quickly transfered, similarly I used Mozilla Weave (now Firefox Sync) to duplicate my browser settings so within a short time I had an account on the new laptop set up the way that I was used to. Of course, some applications were missing so next I downloaded and installed them. Now I created my daughter’s account, installed required software and everything was complete.