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…