I'm curious to know that answer also if the computer name needs to be the same, granted I plan to make it the same, since I'm planning on doing a clean install on my parents iMac. I don't want to do an old school backup of everything to reinstall, that defeats the purpose of Time Machine. I know I'll have to import the Bookmarks from Safari, since Time Machine doesn't handle that, but I can pull down Apps, Contacts, Documents, Mail boxes, and iTunes files.
c073186, am I missing anything that Time Machine won't do before I proceed in order to make sure everything gets back cleanly?
Apple Genius wasn't much help today. They said you couldn't back up specific files from Time Machine after a clean install. Bunch of lackeys. They even said you can't use Migration Assistant to pull files from Time Machine, since Migration assist is only for going from one computer to another computer. You can't use it on the same machine. I guess they haven't tested Migration Assist since it shows the following: