The main event of this week was the arrival of my new shiny 17″ MacBook Pro.

To mark this event I thought I would take a break from the usual and provide five great links that help you when you come to upgrade your Mac and o not want to use the migration assistant.

Apologies in advance to Windows and Linux users as this is obviously a Mac specific post.

Even if you are not buying a new Mac, the bloated way Apple handles media may mean that you have to move your iTunes or iPhoto library to an external disk so these links contain gems of information.

Here are a collection of five links that I have found useful this week when migrating from my old MacBook Pro to my new MacBook Pro.

• My first link for this week is the Apple Page covering the Migration Assistant. This is an amazing tool that I have used before that allows you to copy all of your settings from your Old Mac to your New Mac over a Firewire cable. Makes upgrading a dream if you are happy with the build of your old machine.
• My second link is a link to a post from eHow about how to Migrate your Mac Email. The post shows you how to move your email as well as preserve your settings such as Smart Mailboxes and Mailbox Rules.
• My third link is a link to an olf post from Merlin Mann that covers Some Handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes. I used this post to recreate these mailboxes that fit in with Merlin’s Inbox Zero methodology.
• My fourth link is a thread on the Apple Forums about how to move your iPhoto library. I copied the whole of my library to my new MacBook Pro and everything was preserved, just how it should be.
• My fifth and last link for this week is a post from the iLounge about how to move your ITunes library. My iTunes library is 40GB and I have it on my new MacBook Pro but I am thinking of moving it to an external storage device so I can share it through the house and also conserve space on my MacBook HDD.

Wishing you all a productive week, as always!

Andrew..