Renamed Pages - 301 or meta refresh?

[nmjudy]

I recently redesigned a website with about 40 pages and 30 pdf files. The company was on a windows server and I moved them over to a linux server. Their old page names had a mix of upper and lower case letters as well as spaces. File names weren't meaningful.

As part of the redesign, I renamed their pages and pdf documents. At the San Jose SES conference (last August), the latest craze appeared to be 301 redirects. However, after reading through some recent threads - I'm wondering if I should set up a meta refresh for the html pages. (Not sure how to redirect a pdf). The new site has been live for about a week. This is an entry from my log file:

64.68.82.176 - - [31/Jan/2004:04:59:15 -0500] "GET /Products/yag_samplepage.html HTTP/1.0" 301 285 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

I see that the 301 directive was given...but should I be seeing the new page being spidered? Would meta refresh be better/safer for page name changes? I really don't want this site to be dropped for a month/months while Googlebot does it's thing...just want the new pages indexed and the old one's dropped.