In a shocking turn of events my wife, having reached a breaking point with her 1-year old Dell laptop, decided to accept a new 20” iMac as a replacement. My MacBook Pro, having been the lone AppleTalker on the network, welcomed the new addition with a heartfelt “BonJour!” It turns out that the new member of the family sports the same 2.4 GHz CPU as the MacBook Pro, but came up slightly short on RAM. Nothing a quick trip to NewEgg couldn’t fix with the addition of an extra 2GB stick to bring the total up to three.

Out of the box the machine handled like a Tiger, but within an hour had advanced with Leopard like reflexes. Moments later, the new machine reached out to the new .mac account to synchronize all her settings with the interwebs. The MacBook pro, sensing the desire to share information, enabled his fast user switching to allow easy selection of user accounts. On either machine, my wife and I can quickly jump to our account and have our settings immediately available (mail accounts, bookmarks, keychain of web site passwords, etc.). This should make travel nice, since we’ll also be able to jump Back to Her Mac while away if we need to snag any pictures for the family.

The road has been pretty trouble free so far. A slight configuration problem with IMAP on Gmail caused Mail to dump out some nasty remarks, but tweaking the settings on the server made all happy again.

At the same time, I threw a Lacie Ethernet Big Disk (1TB) on the network to store all of our shared files (over 280 GB of lossless audio and movie files), plus at least another 100GB of photos, plus back of files of tons more stuff. This should allow me to reduce the footprint of the single remaining Windows machine significantly. I’m thinking very soon a Mac Mini running Leopard OSX Server might be joining the household to round out the remaining slot.

Now to reformat the old laptop and get it up on eBay…