OK, not seen anything specific on here though there are quite a few web links around and magazine articles and books that cover things in great detail.
It's basically what I did, some things were pre-planned as I had time to do them while waiting for my Mac to arrive, others I had to work out on the fly or go back and sort out. It may not be the ideal way but it worked
As ever it's the little things that tend to trip you up.
Preparing
My PC is fairly old but there's nothing special about anything I've done to it, standard stuff really. I use Firefox for the Web and Thunderbird for email but other than that it's standard MS Office apps, Photoshop etc. There is just one program I use that has no Mac version but I've an old Dell laptop that can handle that when I need to use it. For the main part I intended to go with the default apps that come with the Mac plus things like OpenOffice for MS Office files. The home network is part ethernet (for the PC - no wifi card on it!) and part wireless (for my wife's laptop)
I bought a 1Tb Western Digital MyBook. There's two things I wanted to use this for: transfering my data between the machines; and as the drive for Time Machine on the Mac. Fortunately, I'm reasonably organised when it comes to flinging files around on my PC, so all my photographs are (ahem - were) in C:\pictures; work files were in C:\work; etc. If your files aren't well organised, now is the time to do it! It's a lot less work to copy one or two directories than searching for files in multiple locations.
After plugging the drive in to the PC and with two Explorer windows open - one for the PC and one for the external drive - I simply drag and dropped the required folders from the PC onto the external drive. Depending on how much data you have, go off and have a cup of coffee or go to bed, it can take a while, I left mine running overnight.
Next: email. There are various utilities available to help in this but since I was using Thunderbird I just copied the various mailbox files (I have(had) lots of rules to move things around into various subfolders) onto the drive. Note that this straight copying doesn't handle attachments so if these are important, look into using one of the utilities.
While in Thunderbird I wrote down the POP and SMTP server settings for my email client. Doing the same for FTP from my FTP program.
The last things to get copied were Firefox bookmarks and the address list from Thunderbird. Again, these were in a standard format, users of IE and Outlook may have more work to do, just look for the export option in both apps.
Most people these days have WiFi networks at home and these should be secured using WPA or WPA-2 so you will need the security key for the network. I'd put mine in a plain text file when setting up the network so copied that to the external disk.
Setting up the Mac
Remove from box, plug everything in and switch on if you are a man, if you are a woman: remove from box, read the instructions, plug everything in and switch on.
I found it easiest to have an ethernet cable to connect to my router/wifi access point rather than go for the WiFi option straight away. This let the machine connect to the web and get any updates before I did anything else. It also meant I knew I had network/internet access before trying the WiFi and so had a fallback option. Once the Mac had done its thing, it was time to personalise it.
Restoration
While still in the default administrator account, I plugged in the external drive and declined its use for Time Machine. The first thing I wanted to try was WiFi so I copied the file with the key onto the desktop, unplugged the ethernet cable and followed the instructions, copying in the key when asked. It all worked!! Sort of - I'd done something wrong so during the day each time the Mac went to sleep and I woke it up, the internet connection had gone and I needed to enter the security password again - not easy remembering it when it's 63 characters long! A bit of asking around and deleting an entry in KeyChain plus some other "fiddling" solved it.
Next up was creating a user account - again just followed instructions - and then logged into the machine using this. I also set up an account for my wife and a "Guest" account if anyone visiting us wanted web access. Always best to use a normal user account for day to day stuff, if you need to be an admin for any reason you will be asked to "Authenticate" before going ahead. Actually, this confused me the first time I saw it while installing a program and I clicked "Cancel" as I thought it meant to Authenticate the package I was installing. If you click "Authenticate" you are taken to a second dialog box where you enter an admin user's name and password. I feel it would be better if there was just the one dialog with the admin name and password fields along with "Authenticate" and "Cancel" buttons, there's no reason for the first dialog. Anyway back to the setup.
Mostly this was just the reverse of the PC to disk step: I dragged the folders from the external disk to the documents folder in my home, or user, folder. This is much quicker than the writing to disk step, it took about twenty minutes for my stuff.
Even though I had been using Thunderbird on the PC, I'm going to try Mail on the Mac as much to see what it was like as for anything. If I don't like it I can always install Thunderbird and import the mailboxes to that app. The first time you open Mail it asks for the POP and SMTP details so type those in from your notes. My machine took a little while, 5 minutes or so, to connect to the SMTP server but once it did everything worked. Choose import mailbox and in Finder navigate to the folder holding the mailboxes and click continue - they are put into a folder called import->inbox.
Since the address list doesn't live in Mail but in Address Book, I imported my address list to that. No problems - a bit bare but that's because Address Book has more fields than Thunderbird. This is one advantage of using standards - both Thunderbird and Address Book use the same format. Outlook users may have more steps to perform.
Fired up iTunes and connected up my iPod. It wanted to format the thing! What the hell, I'd got the original catalog on both the PC and the external disk so what could go wrong? I clicked OK and it replaced the Windows file system with the Mac one and resynched my iPod. A quick check and Led Zep are still rocking!
Finally, Firefox bookmarks. These are exported in a HTML file, both Firefox (obviously) and Safari on the Mac can read the file so it was simply a case of running the "import bookmarks" command in both browsers to grab them.
Mac specific Stuff
Finally I reconnected the external drive and chose the "Use as Backup Disk" button and allowed Time Machine to format the drive and do the initial backup. If you are worried about losing the data on the drive then the only way round it is to purchase a second drive and keep the original as a PC/Mac compatible disk. You've got two copies of the data (one on the PC and one on the Mac) so this would just be a belt and braces approach. The initial TM backup will took a hour or so but after that backups only take a minute or so.
Obviously there'll be one or two things that I've forgotten so I'm keeping the PC running for a day or two while I sort things out. It's a bit like moving home and you aren't sure what is in which box. I now use a USB thumb drive to copy over the occasional files that I've missed.
Summary
Hopefully the above is complete enough to give an idea of what is involved in migrating from a Windows machine to a Mac. If you use MS apps like Outlook or Internet Explorer then there will be a little extra work in getting the data into a standard format. Most of the time was waiting for files to be copied from one disk to another so it was really just letting the machines get on with it.
HTH
It's basically what I did, some things were pre-planned as I had time to do them while waiting for my Mac to arrive, others I had to work out on the fly or go back and sort out. It may not be the ideal way but it worked
As ever it's the little things that tend to trip you up.Preparing
My PC is fairly old but there's nothing special about anything I've done to it, standard stuff really. I use Firefox for the Web and Thunderbird for email but other than that it's standard MS Office apps, Photoshop etc. There is just one program I use that has no Mac version but I've an old Dell laptop that can handle that when I need to use it. For the main part I intended to go with the default apps that come with the Mac plus things like OpenOffice for MS Office files. The home network is part ethernet (for the PC - no wifi card on it!) and part wireless (for my wife's laptop)
I bought a 1Tb Western Digital MyBook. There's two things I wanted to use this for: transfering my data between the machines; and as the drive for Time Machine on the Mac. Fortunately, I'm reasonably organised when it comes to flinging files around on my PC, so all my photographs are (ahem - were) in C:\pictures; work files were in C:\work; etc. If your files aren't well organised, now is the time to do it! It's a lot less work to copy one or two directories than searching for files in multiple locations.
After plugging the drive in to the PC and with two Explorer windows open - one for the PC and one for the external drive - I simply drag and dropped the required folders from the PC onto the external drive. Depending on how much data you have, go off and have a cup of coffee or go to bed, it can take a while, I left mine running overnight.
Next: email. There are various utilities available to help in this but since I was using Thunderbird I just copied the various mailbox files (I have(had) lots of rules to move things around into various subfolders) onto the drive. Note that this straight copying doesn't handle attachments so if these are important, look into using one of the utilities.
While in Thunderbird I wrote down the POP and SMTP server settings for my email client. Doing the same for FTP from my FTP program.
The last things to get copied were Firefox bookmarks and the address list from Thunderbird. Again, these were in a standard format, users of IE and Outlook may have more work to do, just look for the export option in both apps.
Most people these days have WiFi networks at home and these should be secured using WPA or WPA-2 so you will need the security key for the network. I'd put mine in a plain text file when setting up the network so copied that to the external disk.
Setting up the Mac
Remove from box, plug everything in and switch on if you are a man, if you are a woman: remove from box, read the instructions, plug everything in and switch on.
I found it easiest to have an ethernet cable to connect to my router/wifi access point rather than go for the WiFi option straight away. This let the machine connect to the web and get any updates before I did anything else. It also meant I knew I had network/internet access before trying the WiFi and so had a fallback option. Once the Mac had done its thing, it was time to personalise it.
Restoration
While still in the default administrator account, I plugged in the external drive and declined its use for Time Machine. The first thing I wanted to try was WiFi so I copied the file with the key onto the desktop, unplugged the ethernet cable and followed the instructions, copying in the key when asked. It all worked!! Sort of - I'd done something wrong so during the day each time the Mac went to sleep and I woke it up, the internet connection had gone and I needed to enter the security password again - not easy remembering it when it's 63 characters long! A bit of asking around and deleting an entry in KeyChain plus some other "fiddling" solved it.
Next up was creating a user account - again just followed instructions - and then logged into the machine using this. I also set up an account for my wife and a "Guest" account if anyone visiting us wanted web access. Always best to use a normal user account for day to day stuff, if you need to be an admin for any reason you will be asked to "Authenticate" before going ahead. Actually, this confused me the first time I saw it while installing a program and I clicked "Cancel" as I thought it meant to Authenticate the package I was installing. If you click "Authenticate" you are taken to a second dialog box where you enter an admin user's name and password. I feel it would be better if there was just the one dialog with the admin name and password fields along with "Authenticate" and "Cancel" buttons, there's no reason for the first dialog. Anyway back to the setup.
Mostly this was just the reverse of the PC to disk step: I dragged the folders from the external disk to the documents folder in my home, or user, folder. This is much quicker than the writing to disk step, it took about twenty minutes for my stuff.
Even though I had been using Thunderbird on the PC, I'm going to try Mail on the Mac as much to see what it was like as for anything. If I don't like it I can always install Thunderbird and import the mailboxes to that app. The first time you open Mail it asks for the POP and SMTP details so type those in from your notes. My machine took a little while, 5 minutes or so, to connect to the SMTP server but once it did everything worked. Choose import mailbox and in Finder navigate to the folder holding the mailboxes and click continue - they are put into a folder called import->inbox.
Since the address list doesn't live in Mail but in Address Book, I imported my address list to that. No problems - a bit bare but that's because Address Book has more fields than Thunderbird. This is one advantage of using standards - both Thunderbird and Address Book use the same format. Outlook users may have more steps to perform.
Fired up iTunes and connected up my iPod. It wanted to format the thing! What the hell, I'd got the original catalog on both the PC and the external disk so what could go wrong? I clicked OK and it replaced the Windows file system with the Mac one and resynched my iPod. A quick check and Led Zep are still rocking!
Finally, Firefox bookmarks. These are exported in a HTML file, both Firefox (obviously) and Safari on the Mac can read the file so it was simply a case of running the "import bookmarks" command in both browsers to grab them.
Mac specific Stuff
Finally I reconnected the external drive and chose the "Use as Backup Disk" button and allowed Time Machine to format the drive and do the initial backup. If you are worried about losing the data on the drive then the only way round it is to purchase a second drive and keep the original as a PC/Mac compatible disk. You've got two copies of the data (one on the PC and one on the Mac) so this would just be a belt and braces approach. The initial TM backup will took a hour or so but after that backups only take a minute or so.
Obviously there'll be one or two things that I've forgotten so I'm keeping the PC running for a day or two while I sort things out. It's a bit like moving home and you aren't sure what is in which box. I now use a USB thumb drive to copy over the occasional files that I've missed.
Summary
Hopefully the above is complete enough to give an idea of what is involved in migrating from a Windows machine to a Mac. If you use MS apps like Outlook or Internet Explorer then there will be a little extra work in getting the data into a standard format. Most of the time was waiting for files to be copied from one disk to another so it was really just letting the machines get on with it.
HTH