questions regarding migrate or set up as new rMBP

[SR 7]

I got a new laptop and I am trying to decide whether I should migrate my old macbook onto the new one or just set it up as a new mac and transfer over some files I need often but I have a few questions here:

1) my old mac is very old and lethargic which is most likely related to hardware but wondering if I do migrate this old mac onto the new one and if there are any corrupt files or issues on the old one causing issues would it transfer over to my new mac and in turn cause problems as well? or the migrate is just select items? My understanding is the back up I create is so if my HD crashes I have everything in "AS IS" on the back up therefore everything will transfer over to the new one including issues correct? Kind of like restoring an iPhone or iPad where all the settings and apps etc transfer over.

2) If i only transfer items I use without migrating my old mac, how can I get my saved back ups of my iPhone on iTunes onto the new mac? Or that isn't possible unless I do the migrate?

I am just thinking if some of the lagging and slowness/issues of my old computer is file related and I migrate my mac over to the new one it may transfer that issue onto the new one and I definitely don't want that but I am not entirely sure whether that is even possible or not? I remember with windows back in the day and most likely still now if you transfer over a corrupt file it would affect your entire system. Not sure if OS X operates like that as well.

 

[EchoSierra]

If you migrate with the migration assistant (that is, you're doing it through OSX and not cloning the filesystem) only the user files will be migrated over, not system files. If I were you, I'd probably go for the migration.

 

[JTToft]

Do the migrate. You lose nothing and it's way way easier. If you find you do have issues (which is unlikely), you can always just start over and copy things over manually.

 

[SR 7]

question on this, will it also migrate my "user account"? Somehow when I upgraded HD 6 years ago I managed to create a new user account during the transferring of my old mac HD so it caused issues and has been there since.

I don't want that same "user account" transferring over as I believe it may have contributed to some issues. I remember receiving an error saying you renamed your user account with may affect the performance or something along those lines.

Will the user account transfer to the new one or just everything copies onto the "new" user account on the computer.