[Sapporo Guy]

I'm gonna agree with somachmonkey, sounds like your HD is pooched!

The biggest problem with migration is that you import all kinds of junk over a fresh install and "might" have permission problems.

You could buy a new internal hard drive and plug it into an external box, use a program like super duper, clone etc and move your files to a new install on the new drive, pull out the old drive and then move the the new drive that was acting like an external into your machine.

Yeah, I know sounds all round about and such but you won't have problems with speed issues by only depending on the external.

I've migrated a few PPC/G5 machines to intel recently and found that clean installing and then moving only documents/itunes worked the best. The other stuff in your user folder is probably full of all kinds of files from software that you tried and then trashed and what not.

As for Office ... Older version was giving problems with printing on 10.6. Got me a deal on a newer version and solved that. However, I have been trying to move more and more of my documents to pages or OpenOffice. Excel is the deal breaker though.

I tend NOT to use backup software and do things by hand.
items to remember:
- mail
- images/movies
- address book
- documents
- itunes
- calendar

file structure: (for each user)
-- library --- application support --- addressbook
-- library --- calendars
-- library --- keychains
-- library --- mail
-- library --- mail downloads

The above are the major items I move anything else I leave on my backup (time machine might be great for this) of the system just in case I forgot something or screwed up.


IF you do move to an intel machine most applications will work and the speed hit is not so bad. However some will just spew (recently had problems with a version of AppleWorks) and had to look for versions that work or other work arounds.