In the past, if you bought a new Mac, you had to sit in front of your old Mac and move all of your files - applications, music, photos, graphics, samples, and so on - to your new Mac. It could take hours, particularly since we musicians aren't always the best when it comes to keeping our filing system simple. It wasn't a task that proud owners of a bright, shiny new Mac looked forward to. But all that changed with the release of OS X 10.4, otherwise known as "Tiger," and has continued with the latest operating system, OS 10.5 or "Leopard."

When it's time to make that "big move," just connect your new Mac to your old Mac with a single FireWire cable. Next, go to your new Mac and look inside the Applications folder, where you'll see the Utilities folder. Inside it is an application called Migration Assistant. Go ahead and double-click on it, since it's an assistant, it will actually lead you through a series of screens with simple questions about what you want to do. Just answer the questions, and Migration Assistant does everything else! It makes the move, and also retains all your settings for things like e-mail, bookmarks, and passwords. Because, let's face it, you have better things to do than transferring the contents of one Mac to another!