What is the BEST way to migrate data to NEW Machine from OLD?

[late show]

I am buying the macbook pro 17" in a few weeks, to replace my powerbook g4 1.5GHz laptop.

In the old days, I would:

1. Carbon copy clone my old machine.
2. Do a fresh install of the OS to the new machine from the DVD install.
3. Re-install all my apps from fresh downloads and install disks
3. Drag over all my user data from the old machine.
4. done.

The above took a lot of time to do, and maybe is not the best way?....I have been using time machine to do my backups.

Should I just do the time machine restore?

I do like knowing I am starting again with a clean machine, but man, it takes forever, and some things like itunes songs and expensive apps get crabby about moving to the new machine...

 

[mckvakk]

An ethernet cable between the old and new mac

There's a (pardon the microsoft word) wizard for doing this.
You can do this the first time you start the new machine. Can be done over wi-fi also

 

[VPrime]

Migration assistant.
It is located in the Applications > Utilities.

 

[the mac geek]

^Migration Assistant.

But, unless you really want all your settings I would not use it to migrate entire accounts. Unless the old machine was on the same version of Mac OS and does not have a lot of bulk from previous migrations from previous OS versions.

I would do one of the following:
1. If I was selling the old one soon, I would take a disk image and store that somewhere. Put it on the new one, mount it, and drag.

2. Target disk the old Mac and drag stuff over (Firewire).

3. Migration Assistant unless the machine was as described above.

 

[detz]

I'm not sure how I'm going to do this either. I was going to migrate everything over but since this computer is the first Mac I've owned there are things on there that only a "noob" would do so I know better now. Also, my file structure is all over the place so it would be nice to start over and do it correctly.

I'm probably just going to mount this HD to my server and copy over the apps that I want and slowly copy over files as I need them. It will take longer but my machine will be cleaner for it.