| Neighbor switching to Mac, but old PC is a mess
My poor neighbor and his naive trust in the world led him to download and install not one, but five!!! anti-spyware programs that are essentially malware themselves. His PC is totally bogged down and useless. You can't do anything on it after it starts up. I did a little research and uninstalling just one is a major ordeal (you can't just remove programs through windows) and Best Buy wants about $400 to clean it up. Thankfully he wants to just get a new computer, and I finally convinced him that a Mac is the way to go! Chalk up another switch for me (Apple should give me a cut for all of this - this is at least #40).
Of course he has files that he wants to salvage. More important, his wife has files that are important and wants to strangle him! Here is my dumb question. If he bought a USB 2 drive could we boot the PC off a CD (or even a floppy) and be able to access his PC drive and the new USB drive in order to copy over files (documents, images, quicken stuff..)? Are there any surprises to look out for? For example, if he doesn't know the admin password, getting the machine booted of a disk to recognize the external drive... Hey, this is what neighbors are for right?
Of course that same drive will have a useful life on the Mac side for backups.
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