Transferring from one iMac to a new iBook

qwikstreet

qwikstreet

OS X Friendly
In the near future, I am selling my iMac to my sister and buying a new iBook.

What I want to know is how and if (I'm sure there's a way) to transfer everything I have done, added, and accomplished on my 4yrs with this iMac. I want to transfer over every piece of software, all preferences, files, every customized icon, every tiny little thing. So it would appear that my iMac DV SE just blossomed into a iBook.
 
What vintage iMac? If it has FireWire, you could put the iBook in Target Disk mode, then copy your User folder and whatever applications (and whatever else) you want to keep to the iBook.

If the iMac lacks Firewire, you can still do it with sharing over ethernet, but it will be much slower.

This (firewire target mode) is what I did when I upgraded from my iBook to a TiBook, and almost everything was just as I had had it on the iBook. It only took about an hour or so to get everthing moved over and settled in.
 
PS If you don't have firewire, like kenny said, you can transfer it over ethernet.

What you might not know is the best way to do that is to get an ethernet crossover cable, plug one end into your iMac and the other end into your iBook; that will be relatively quick, and cheap too.
 
Actually, with an iBook, any standard cat5 ethernet cable will do; it doesn't have to to be crossover. The iBooks and PowerBooks all have autosensing to work out whether the cable needs to be crossover or straight-through and will configure its own port accordingly.

It impressed the heck out of one of my coworkers the other day --

We were in one of the server rooms reconfiguring a switch with my iBook, and I wanted to get to the web interface, so I just grabbed a cable, and he started stuttering - "but.. but.. wait..." and I said, "What? What's wrong?" "I think that's a crossover cable. It won't work," he said (we were plugging into a standard downstream port). I looked at the cable, it was crossover, and I said, "Hm... so it is..." and proceeded to connect anyway. The lights came on on the switch indicating a link, and the look on my coworker's face was just priceless. He was literally speechless for something like 30 seconds, and even then, the first thing he said was "Huh?"... :)

I let him in on the "secret" of course, but he still though it was about the coolest thing he'd seen in quite a long time.
 
No, it's not. Ethernet on the iBook maxxes out at 100Mbps, while Firewire has a maximum speed of 400Mbps...
 
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