Neighbor switching to Mac, but old PC is a mess

karavite · #1 September 6th, 2008, 11:55 AM

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.

nixgeek · #2 September 6th, 2008, 12:03 PM

If you do offload the files from the PC to an external drive, you could possible install ClamXav on the Mac and scan the drive once it's connected to the Mac. The other option would be to boot from a Live GNU/Linux disc like Knoppix (which has a KDE desktop), update clamav on the live environment, scan the Windows hard drive (make sure it's mounted with write capabilities with FUSE and NTFS-3g...there should be a menu option for that in Knoppix), and then move the files to an external drive.

And if they're willing, you might want to see about showing them something like Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS which is geared towards the end user. The only issue would be if they are attached to particular Windows apps, but seeing as the main computer would be the Mac it might not be that much of an issue. Even still, WINE might help but YMMV.

Just some thoughts.

karavite · #3 September 6th, 2008, 12:06 PM

Thanks, but that seems like an awful lot to walk a neighbor through... for free!!! :-)

nixgeek · #4 September 6th, 2008, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by karavite

Thanks, but that seems like an awful lot to walk a neighbor through... for free!!! :-)

Ah! I assumed that you were going to do this for your neighbor. Yes, well if your neighbor would be going it alone, going the Live Disc route might be quite overwhelming. It would probably be best to move the stuff to an external drive and then scan the drive using something like ClamXav on the Mac once it's connected to it.

And if you are doing it, my explanation might make it seem more difficult that it really is. You could try burning a Knoppix ISO to a disc and testing the live environment for yourself just to get familiar with it. The ISOs are here:

http://knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html

Just pick the mirror closest to you.