So my older brother down­loaded some mali­cious soft­ware on my parent’s iMac. Boom: com­puter doesn’t work. My dad took it to the local Mac fix-it shop and they said they couldn’t revive it. For the record, he was using Win­dows through Boot Camp when he down­loaded said software.

Mac’s don’t get viruses in their native OS (although there is a Tro­jan Horse or two out there), but if you use Boot Camp to run Win­dows on a Mac, the Win­dows par­ti­tion is vul­ner­a­ble to mali­cious Win­dows software.

I’m com­pletely ready to trash the Win­dows par­ti­tion and start from scratch, but hope­fully I don’t have to for­mat the Mac par­ti­tion… UGH!

So my week­end chal­lenge is to suc­ceed where Neural Net could not and get this machine work­ing again, hope­fully with as few (data) casu­al­ties as pos­si­ble. If you have any advice or well-wishes, leave it in the comments!

Update: It took me 10 min­utes to fix the prob­lem. The only casu­alty was my bro’s pirated movie/music col­lec­tion. You can imag­ine how bad I feel about that…

Keith asks:

My Win­dows XP PC kicked the bucket, but its hard drive is fine. I bought an iMac; how do I get my doc­u­ments from my PC’s hard drive to my new Mac?

You could net­work your PC and iMac, but your PC is fried. I rec­om­mend buy­ing a 3.5 inch hard drive enclo­sure that has a USB or FireWire inter­face on it. Take the hard drive out of your PC, install it in the enclo­sure and attach it to your iMac. Voila! There’s your hard drive! You can copy what­ever impor­tant doc­u­ments you have to your Mac.

This process is extremely easy; don’t get intim­i­dated by the task of doing surgery on your old PC. Look on the bright side: you don’t have to put any­thing back together!

Once you’re done, for­mat the hard drive using Disk Util­ity (it hides in Applications>Utilities) and you can use it as extra stor­age on your Mac.

*Note: Make sure your hard drive is com­pat­i­ble with the enclo­sure! Most desk­tops man­u­fac­tured in the last year and a half use SATA inter­face while older ones use the IDE (or PATA) inter­face. Take a quick peek at the cable and com­pare it with the afore­men­tioned arti­cles.
**One last thing: You can do this with a lap­top hard drive as well; just buy a 2.5 inch enclosure.

Cor­win says:

I’m work­ing in Final Cut Pro, but the video in the viewer looks very dis­torted… there’s lines all through it, and it looks inter­laced. I just switched com­put­ers from an eMac to the new iMac. I don’t get it, I even have the can­vas size at 100%, so it should be run­ning at full qual­ity. Will it look like this in the fin­ished prod­uct? How do I fix this?

Short answer: your fin­ished prod­uct will be just fine.

Long answer: Most video you tape nowa­days is inter­laced. The LCD dis­play on your iMac is not inter­laced. That’s why your video looks like junk: it’s flash­ing a bunch of lines on the screen, but that’s not how your dis­play works. AH!

So how do you fix this? To work around this prob­lem, you could use a dein­ter­lace fil­ter on your whole video, but then it’d look like junk on inter­laced dis­plays (old tube TV’s and com­puter mon­i­tors). Instead, you have to trick Final Cut Pro into dein­ter­lac­ing your video only when it’s in your can­vas: just resize the win­dow slightly and select “Fit to Win­dow” in your can­vas’ view options. As long as you’re not view­ing the video at 100%, it’ll look just great. Yeah, I know. Silly prob­lem!

Oh, and if you use this trick, your fin­ished prod­uct will still be inter­laced when you export it. And in most sit­u­a­tions, that’s a good thing.