Well, that wasn’t so difficult. The only problem is the damn Firewire 800 port. My old MacBook Pro had a Firewire 400 port, and they are totally incompatible; I’m buying an adapter from moshi as we speak. It seems to be pretty highly rated on Amazon.com, and unlike ratings for books, I trust the ratings for electronics. “Doesn’t work (all that well)” versus “works (beautifully)” is a pretty clear line.

Good thing I copied everything I needed onto the FreeAgent ((Thanks to some experiences while I was a sysadmin, to this day I shiver if I try to buy a drive that’s not a Seagate. Especially if it’s Western Digital, though I hear WD got better.)) drive (which is so gosh-darned huge; the techie in me says, “Get another one!” because one can never have too many processor cores, too much RAM, or too much disk).

I’ve decided to Redo From Start, and just copy the stuff I need over—and slim down the applications I actually need. I’m also getting off Google Chrome. It was a beautifully fast thing… until somehow it not only f’d itself over, but started crashing on Google Apps. Which is so very lame. And it never had a reliably working AdBlock or NoScript. So yeah.

We’ll find out shortly how iTunes deals with re-importing a library which has DRM tracks in it.

I’ve also gotten a moshi ClearGuard keyboard cover for the keyboard. I’m almost positive that the old MacBook Pro started having heating issues after I accidentally spilled diluted lemonade on the keyboard a month ago during one of my funny turns. I’ve never actually done that before. I’m not letting it happen again. It takes a little getting used to, but it feels quite nice—the separated keys of the newer MacBook laptops really let a keyboard cover set in properly.

Hmm. I see they’ve made the default sharing preference more secure (everything OFF). And… my gods, if you look at the preferences for the trackpad, which is now The Big Button, it will show animated demos of what each option means. Seriously. I am loving this. I turned 1-click tapping on (so I don’t have to press down the Big Button); we’ll see if this is annoying or not, but the trackpad can actually detect well between touching and tapping. Certainly it makes double-clicking (or rather, tapping) much easier.

Oh! iTunes works! Successfully auth’d the computer. Whew. Now I need to figure out how to de-auth the dead MacBook Pro. Oh. I can’t do that. Because the MacBook Pro is dead, so I’d have to wait until I hit the five computer registration limit before I nuke all my auths and redo the ones I need. Okay, not bothering right now.

And of course, I have a zillion updates to apply. As soon as Time Machine is finished backing up, which it hasn’t yet.

Anyways: moshi ClearGuard, Seagate, and this light tapping thing of the trackpad for the win.