I found it pretty frustrating that in my attempts to get past the toast I made of the security credentials I ended up running four reinstalls of Lion and each one had a two hour pre-installation download of "components". There's really no way to make that more streamlined? Does every MacBook Pro sale assume such internet ubiquity, or are the Apple Store lines longer in other environments?

Still, I'm typing on the new machine now, and it's pretty and silky and it's all mine!

As long as I let it have Internet, it seems.

So, whenever I have had a new mac, I have not had much to setup. You are right that installation of a new operating system can take a bit, but for the most part, it did not take me that long on either of the two machines on which I installed Lion.

I am not sure WTF I will do about Mountain Lion because I have Lion on ONE computer and have Snow Leopard on the other computer I use a lot. I guess I'll have to get all on the same operating system soon.

If I'd done it right, I'd have been fine. It's just that the first time I completed it, I ended up with a login screen and no password to get past it. All the time and frustration and garbled posting was me trying to get past that.

I'm not going to use the migration assistant for anything, in the end. I'll get the hang of tweaking Lion myself, and hopefully end up with a tidier computer. I'll always have Time Capsules of the other box, and I might just copy over a few "popular" folders to the NAS so I can get to them from all the clients.

I have a new machine I need to setup today, but now I'm dealing with network accounts. I think this will make it easier, but I won't really know until I'm ankle deep in it. The home folder for this machine is now running from the server, so I think I can just copy the admin account, which should also copy all of the applications, and then I can log in with my network account credentials on the new box and I'll be good to go.

Does anyone here on OS X use any mail application other than what comes with the OS? And why? What was wrong with Mail, or is right with what you use instead?

And if you use Gmail, do you never download your mail?

I never use Mail.

On occasion, I use Thunderbird (especially when I need to do a mail merge).

I use mail in Google Chrome (gmail). I backup via Cloudpull.

I never download my email. I probably should.

Apple Mail is good enough for me.

Huh. I'm totally conditioned to use email clients. Like, during the day at work, I use a webmail client for my primary email, which is my own domain address, and my Android devices use IMAP because of limitations of the clients on that platform, but both options frustrate me. But I'm not going to download personal email onto my work computer, and maybe it's been long enough I can look at Android email clients again.

However, I run Mail on my Mac which contains some emails going back as far as...2004 on...11 email accounts , including some on gmail. And you can bet I want to work out how to get those onto this one. I also have Thunderbird running full time on the PC downloading mail for about 7 or 8 email addresses, only one of which isn't also covered by the Mac, and which I will get around to setting up on the new one.

There is a function inside Mail for exporting mailboxes. So you can export them on your old machine and then import them into the new one. I've got mail archived on this machine going back to the middle 90's when I was using Claris em@iler. I've been able to export mailboxes and keep them moving between machines.