Help! We just bought our first iMac

I just bought my wife an iMac for X-mas. Our previous computer was an HP tower running Windows XP (I believe it is 6 years old). It has all of our pictures on it and of course our entire iTunes library. I tried running Migration Assistant several times yesterday and could not get it to work. I tried doing it wirelessly as well as connecting the two computers together via a network cable. Each time the new iMac would not recognize our PC and our PC would not recognize the iMac. Could someone please help? My wife is so excited about her new iMac and I would really like to set this up for her. Thanks in advance.



-Justin

Congrats on your new Mac, you will love it. What I did when I was in your situation last year was I just bought an external hard drive, connected it to my old computer and uploaded the files, then connected it to my new Mac and downloaded the files. Worked fine. Then I used the external hard drive as my Time Machine for backing up my Mac.

There may be more elegant ways to do it that the experts here can share, but that is how I did it.

Good luck.

I used an external hard drive exactly that same way too. Best to work with a copy of all the files in case something goes wrong. I also spent a lot of time researching the best way to prepare a copy of my iTunes files for copying to the new Mac, which paid off in spades. There are a few tricks to be aware of, well documented online. Google time came in very handy. I did not use migration software, but others in the know can give you advice on that.

I took mine to the apple store and let them do it. It took a couple of days, got home, everything was there, no problem.
JJ

i have never tried it from a PC to Mac but according to this it will work. DrtyHnds: How to Use Migration Assistant From PC to Mac 10.7 Lion

Christopher 123 said:

Congrats on your new Mac, you will love it. What I did when I was in your situation last year was I just bought an external hard drive, connected it to my old computer and uploaded the files, then connected it to my new Mac and downloaded the files. Worked fine. Then I used the external hard drive as my Time Machine for backing up my Mac.

There may be more elegant ways to do it that the experts here can share, but that is how I did it.

Good luck.

Click to expand...

Exactly how I did it too. Works a treat and very simple to do. Only annoying thing is the time it takes to copy everything to the external HDD and then over to your Mac, or maybe it's because I'm a bit impatient!

edit: Just make sure you copy the files over to the correct place. Such as music in music, etc etc. Can copy over your iTunes library file too and it will recognise it and put all your music in your iTunes how you had it before.