MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Transferring Settings Wirelessly from Another Mac

Getting a new Mac is always a joyous event, but that joy is often short-lived when you realize that you need to transfer tons of settings, preferences, and files from your old Mac. Apple took pity on new Mac users when it released OS X 10.4 (Tiger), which included an application called Migration Assistant. This application automates the process of transferring user accounts, settings, files, and applications from one Mac to another. That’s the good news.

The bad news was that Migration Assistant worked best over either a direct FireWire connection between the two Macs or a wired network connection. This is bad news because, of course, MacBook Air doesn’t include either a FireWire or Ethernet port for wired network connections. Fortunately, the bad news is only temporary because Apple has tweaked Migration Assistant to operate over a wireless connection (and the latest Macs can use a Thunderbolt connection for even faster transfers). This enables you to transfer settings to your MacBook Air from any Mac running Tiger or later.

If you’ll be transferring data for a user account with the same name as yours (a likely scenario), you can run into conflicts during the transfer. To avoid this, log on to your MacBook Air using a different (administrator) user account, and then perform the transfer.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Shut ...