Desperate for help setting up new imac

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Hello!
I am not exactly a newbie but may as well be considered one.
I am having many questions and concerns about transferring from my older 2006 macbook pro to my new iMac. I apologize if some of this can be found in the forum..I have tried looking for some but not sure what exactly to search for..

1. My old macbook was purchased used and loaded with programs like Adobe CS5.
If possible, I am really hoping to be able to keep this.
I do not have the codes for it thought.

2. I have never used the time machine and am wondering if that is the way to transfer things over, and worry is it going to override all the new stuff on my imac with the old stuff on the macbook.???

3. What exactly is the best way to make sure your stuff from the old one gets onto the new one without taking over or overriding the new stuff..

I didn't have many files on the old one so I was able to transfer them with an external drive. Tried to transfer the Adobe stuff that way but it didnt work.
The only other thing I am concerned with is my music.
I currently use an old itunes account which has like 20,000 songs. These are stored in my iTunes on the old macbook and as files on a non mac drive. Can I somehow make these songs into files so that I don't have to commit to using my old itunes account to get to my music?

Any help with this stuff in the most simplest of descriptions would be so so very appreciated!!!
 

Raz0rEdge

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Hello!
I am not exactly a newbie but may as well be considered one.
I am having many questions and concerns about transferring from my older 2006 macbook pro to my new iMac. I apologize if some of this can be found in the forum..I have tried looking for some but not sure what exactly to search for..

1. My old macbook was purchased used and loaded with programs like Adobe CS5.
If possible, I am really hoping to be able to keep this.
I do not have the codes for it thought.

That would illegal since you didn't purchase Adobe CS5. If you need access to the Adobe applications look into their newly announced & released Adobe Creative Cloud that gives you access to the applications for a monthly membership price as opposed to the single shot price.

Short of going this route, we are not going to help you with anything illegal and continued discussion will get this thread locked down, so be forewarned.

2. I have never used the time machine and am wondering if that is the way to transfer things over, and worry is it going to override all the new stuff on my imac with the old stuff on the macbook.???

3. What exactly is the best way to make sure your stuff from the old one gets onto the new one without taking over or overriding the new stuff..

I didn't have many files on the old one so I was able to transfer them with an external drive. Tried to transfer the Adobe stuff that way but it didnt work.
The only other thing I am concerned with is my music.
I currently use an old itunes account which has like 20,000 songs. These are stored in my iTunes on the old macbook and as files on a non mac drive. Can I somehow make these songs into files so that I don't have to commit to using my old itunes account to get to my music?

Any help with this stuff in the most simplest of descriptions would be so so very appreciated!!!

I'll combine questions 2 and 3 together and say Migration Assistant is a good way of migrating your information from one Mac to another. You can hook up the two Mac's together and let MA to the work for you, or you can point MA to a Time Machine backup and it will pull your data from there..

What version of OS X was running on your old Macbook Pro?

In some ways, if you have very specific stuff you can transfer, it's easier to just copy it all to an external HD and copy it over your new iMac. Say if all of your files were in the /Documents folder and all of your music is in the /iTunes folder. Copy those over to the HD and then to the iMac and you should be fine..

If you were using an older version of iTunes on your MBP, when you launch iTunes in your iMac (having copied the files over already), it will update your library file to conform to the newer version of iTunes.

Once you have your iMac the way you want it, I would strongly recommend that you get Time Machine going for backups at the minimum. You could augment that with a CCC backup which is bootable and all that as well..
 
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Thanks for your reply!
Would the OS be Snow Leopard? That's what is on the old MBP.
I tried to research the Migration thing but I think it said that my old MBP was too old for it or something.
 
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I never used Time Machine on the old computer. If I were to do this, would it override newer versions of things onto the new iMac?
If the old mac doesnt work with migration assistant is there another way that if I set up time machine on the old one, that it would be able to transfer selected items to the new one?
 
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The new iMac will be running Mountain Lion OS X.8. Remember older PowerPC software, such as Office 2004 etc will not work as both Lion and Mountain Lion have done away with Rosetta. If you have an external drive you can clone the drive and then hook up to the iMac and run Migration Assistant.

For what it is worth if you don't have an external drive, get one. Backups are essential.
 
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chas_m

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and time to get legit on your software, or evaluate other options. For example: if you're a very light user of Photoshop CS5, look at Pixelmator instead. It doesn't do everything PS can do, but it's $15 versus $50/month for the latest Photoshop.

One good thing about Photoshop CC is that occasional users can pay for just a month of use at a time, which if they only fire it up occasionally works out to be pretty cheap. For most others, software rental is a bad deal (unless you make your living with it and use it daily, then it's not too awful).
 
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photoshop

Adobe Photoshop CS6 is the 13th major release of Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Photoshop Extended, with the Extended having extra 3D image creation
 

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