EmilyHamerWest

Perfect! That worked, and I doubt if the cats are quite that talented. They spend too much time thinking of ways to murder us and not enough figuring out keyboard tricks. ;-) Thanks!

Mr. Google hasn't provided a definitive answer that I like, so I'm asking here. Is there a way to disable the keyboard brightness control on the apple wireless keyboard? (Yes, I could call Apple care, I guess but sometimes...well, you know. :-D ) I use the Spyder calibration system per Damien's instructions and keep the brightness way down, which is fine, I'm used to it, but the cats apparently dislike it and feel compelled to turn it up. Truthfully I can't always blame the kitties, sometimes it's because the keyboard is shoved on top of my iPad in the slide out shelf and it gets bumped, oops. But unless I'm perfectly certain about the count, down so many from full brightness or up so many clicks from dark, it's a bit dicey to get it back to perfect manually, not to mention I forgot a couple of times when it was only a little bit off and had to go back and redo things. Surely there is a simple way to prevent this?

Whew! (Wipes brow)

Well you know what they say about it not being over till the lady sings? She's still warming up. Setup assistant didn't do anything but bring over my user account. And then the old one overheated and shut down. And then I made a new user account when I started again and had to delete it, but apparently that's common. So then I just started doing everything manually. But then I got myself hooked up to the old one via the network and thought I could use migration assistant to bring files over, but....TaDa, the iMac keeps turning the wifi back ON and ignoring the Ethernet every time I try. So I gave up and decided to do that manually. Now I am dragging folders of photos over from the old Mac to the new one, from one finder to the other. They seem fine, the MB are the same, dates and file names good, and they look ok, but I wanted to run this past you before I went further, in case there is some secret trap for the wary that I don't know about! It will be tedious on the one hand but on the other hand it's a great time to sort out messes and get everything super organized. As for software I've already been downloading everything fresh, thankfully I keep things handy in Evernote so had all the info at hand. Again, this could work to my advantage, really.

Ooh, no I don't - the link says 10.6.8 or later so I'm good. I was worried I would need to put el cap on the old one because there's no way I could. I may end up using your plan since the old one keeps overheating and shutting down. As it is I've been moving a ton to Dropbox and can download from there. Theoretically I could do the entire thing that way I suppose. Thanks!

I am reading that the old MacBook which is running Mavericks has to be updated to the most recent OS before I can use setup assistant to migrate over to the new iMac. Truth or fiction? If it's truth does this apply for a time machine backup? It doesn't seem as if it would matter. And maybe there's a lot of hot air out there on the 'net.

That's what I said! As I explained to hubby why the card was smoking.

PS I just spent so much money I'm hyperventilating. If we didn't love our Macs...

The 3 TB G-drive looks perfect for what I need. I would rather go big now and not have to replace in six months when I've outgrown the system. Thanks!

Ok any recommendations or just a good WD?

Brian, you answered my questions about what graphics processor and memory to buy in another thread, so I will be ordering the 27 inch iMac with the 3tb fusion drive and 4mg graphics and 16gb ram, etc. I already back up my MacBook Pro to Backblaze and time machine on an external, however the last couple times I tried with no luck, possibly because the MacBook is overheating and shuts down midway. It's a mid-2010 with a replaced hard drive but had damage from the elderly cat that was repaired ? And has never quite been the same. We also run a Mac Mini with a server but haven't set it up so the server drive is empty. Mostly we were just sharing word docs over the wifi, as my husband and I are writers. My question now is what should I be looking at for local backup? My current hard drive is a 1Tb and about 80 percent full.