Over the past decade I've used OS X's firewire migration option... (counts on fingers) five times for myself and friends. Four of those times the transfer was flawless and (surprisingly) painless. The one problematic time was because the new machine arrived with bad RAM; although it booted, the new box was for all practical purposes DOA. One warranted replacement later, the migration process worked every bit as well as I'd come to expect.
I think the "app-as-folder" convention and the lack of a central registry are the main contributors to the success of these migrations. "Move this list of folders and files from A to B" is a simple, if tedious, task.
FWIW, I have NOT performed that migration on any machine that had Parallels or VMWare installed; Adobe installs have been the most complicated thing that I've migrated using this utility. If any readers have used the migration on machines containing software (vmware, parallels, etc) that adds kernel extensions, I would be very interested to read the results.
I think the "app-as-folder" convention and the lack of a central registry are the main contributors to the success of these migrations. "Move this list of folders and files from A to B" is a simple, if tedious, task.
FWIW, I have NOT performed that migration on any machine that had Parallels or VMWare installed; Adobe installs have been the most complicated thing that I've migrated using this utility. If any readers have used the migration on machines containing software (vmware, parallels, etc) that adds kernel extensions, I would be very interested to read the results.