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New laptopMy 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.