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…

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.

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.