new mac

with so many troubles with the macbook, the company that sold me the laptop agreed to give me a replacement. after waiting for few weeks, the new one finally arrived.

when i turned it on, i selected to use the migration assistant to transfer data from the time machine. it worked remarkably well (note: both computers need to be set to use the ethernet in case they are connected by an ethernet cable) -- most of things got copied over. i only needed to set up the mouse, printer, network setting by hand. some non-apple-native applications that i installed in the application folder, such as topcat, gimp, also needed re-installation. i was happy to find out that instead of iwork+ilife '08, they gave me iwork+ilife '09.

pretty soon i realized there were some problems:

• grab didn't work perfectly: when trying to grab a sm window, all i got was an image with the bar on the top, and blank everywhere else (NOTE: it turned out that downloading the latest x11 from xquartz project fixed (?) the problem...)
  
• finder didn't work: i couldn't find pdf files that i knew exist (NOTE: it turned out re-indexing spotlight solves the problem)
• java didn't seem to work perfectly; some java programs worked, but topcat didn't
  

are these due to the settings i had with the previous laptop? not sure...probably will have to do a re-installation, then copy data from the backup disk. sigh...