Migrating to a New MacBook - Any Recommendations?

I have been running Parallels 3.x w/ WindowsXP on a year-and-a-half old "black" MacBook. It ran pretty well on Tiger, but not so well when I upgraded to Leopard. But that's a moot point now.

I just purchased one of the new MacBooks with 4GB of RAM and upgraded it with a 7200RPM hard drive. Should be pretty sweet -- at least there is plenty of RAM to run Windows.

So, what's going to be the best way to get Parallels and WinXP running on the new MacBook? I'm planning to do a system (data) transfer from the old MacBook to the new one, which I assume will import Parallels with my Windows partition. I don't know if Windows will work (as it did when I imported my old data into Leopard), I figure at the very least I will have re-activate it.

And now I see that there is a newer version of Parallels v4.0? But, based on a cursory reading of the feedback here, it doesn't sound like that's an upgrade I'm anxious to perform...

Thanks in advance for any thoughts on a smooth migration to the new machine.

--PS

 

The easiest way I found was to connect the old and new MacBook with an ethernet cable. Use the migration assistant to load all of the old applications, including parallels. Allow access to the old computer and copy your VM(s) from the old MacBook to the new one. If you use the ethernet cable it is way faster than wireless. In my case it was tens of hours to convert a 100GB+ VM wirelessly versus minutes with the cable.

 

Oh, Ethernet is a given. I wouldn't even think about doing a migration like this via WiFi. Tooooo Sloooowwwww.

Thanks,

--PS

 

And unless you are in a hurry ... i would say its advisable to stay on the 3.x version of Parallels ... Version 4 is disastrous. Best to stay off until next release ...

 

Yeah, that's what I'm seeing in the forums too. I'm hoping that I can just "migrate" my existing installation of P3 and WinXP to the new machine. It worked well enough originally (before I switched to Leopard, that is), hopefully the improved performance of the new MacBook (4GB total RAM + dedicated video, 7200rpm HDD, faster processor) will provide the difference I'm hoping for. But you're right, there's no imperative to jump to 4.0 given the problems I'm reading about.