I then decided to install a fresh copy of OSX Tiger on the drive. I could have used Carbon Copy Cloner, but figured it would be good to do a fresh install. I used my OSX DVD disk and the install went very smooth. What I love about OSX is that it automatically recognized my old HD as having the more recent version and picked the new HD automatically to install OSX on. A nice touch. But what really impressed me was after the OSX install and restart, the option automatically came up to transfer all my settings from the old HD to the new one. This is a feature of Tiger I had never used and it is just awesome. You can use it to transfer all your stuff from an old Mac to a new one or from an existing HD or partition on your machine to a new one. I picked the checkboxes to transfer everything – network settings, users, files & folders and let OSX do its thing. It took about 45 minutes and the result was simply amazing. Everything transferred without a hitch, down to the desktop pictures and shortcuts I had on my old HD. I then downloaded the combined updater for OSX 10.4.8 and ran it to bring my OS current. I had to run software update for the latest version of iTunes as it wasn’t part of the combined updater. No glitches whatsoever. All my hundreds of iPhoto images were right where they were supposed to be. My iTunes purchased songs played without any license warnings.
This is why I bought a Mac in the first place and why I continue to evangalize the Mac platform. No matter what the Microsoft fanboys claim, Windows has NEVER been able to do stuff like this. At least not as seamlessly and effortlessly as a Mac.