Finally, I'm the proud owner of a new MacBook Pro. And I decided not to use the migration assistant to move all the old junk over to the new, shiny machine. I want to set it up from scratch. I will document what I did and installed. Maybe it helps you in setting up your Mac (or maybe it just helps me in setting up my next MacBook :-)).

1) I started the MacBook Pro and watched the nice starting animation. I love how much Apple invests in such details! After entering some of my details, Mac OS X was up and running. It found a lot of updates to install but after a reboot, everything was up to date.

2) What's next? Okay, I need to be able to read my e-mail on that machine. Quickly. So I started Mail and entered first my GMail account details. Mail did all the rest for me. Then I opened the settings in Mail in my old MacBook and entered the information for my other mail accounts in the new Mail. It took a bit to download all the mails but it worked like a charm.

3) Then, I made the home directory on the old MacBook available on the network (in the system settings). This allowed my to find it in the Finder of the new MacBook and to start copying the iPhoto Library. This may take a while...

4) Meanwhile, we can see what the Mac AppStore can do for us. I started it from the dock. Under "purchased" it showed my all the apps I bought there (after entering my Apple ID). And I could directly download them again to this machine. I chose to install Alfred, Kindle, Time Out Free, Evernote and MindNode (free). Maybe I'll get some more later but these are the essentials.

5) iPhoto is still copying, so I need my ultimate sharing tool: Dropbox. If you have not account yet, you can get it here and get me some more online space. I downloaded the tool from the web site, entered my account and I instantly got all my data. This is how it should work!

6) Meanwhile, the iPhoto library finished copying. Let's see in the next post how I get iPhoto to use it.