Dingdongler

Hi guys,

Firstly many thanks to all those that contributed to my earlier thread. I have made the move over from PC to Mac, my MacBook Pro arrived yesterday.

It looks and feels lovely!

I'm sure I'm going to have lots of questions as I get used to this new machine. Rather than starting a new thread every time I have a question I thought I'd put them all together, this may prove useful for others in the future.

I will try and find the answers on the web first so that I don't abuse the good nature of scoobynet members.

First up then

1) I want to transfer my files from PC to my Mac. I understand there are a number of ways to do this. One of which is to use an ethernet cable.
On my PC I was very lazy with security, I didn't renew my Norton antivirus for about the last 2.5years, so its way out of date.

I only installed adaware spyware about the 2 weeks ago. That found 200 odd 'things' and wiped them.

My PC was working very slowly, freezing, not responding on a regular basis. I'm worried that there maybe viruses on my PC that will be transferred over to my new Mac when load on the files.

Whats the best thing to do?

Thanks

Hanley

A virus that is written to exploit Windows will have no effect on your Mac.

I used a portable USB disk to transfer data across to my Mac, much quicker that way.

Dingdongler

I presume by usb disc you mean external hard drive.? Will that really be the fastest way, as I'll have to download the pc onto it and then upload from it to the mac.

magneel1

iTrader: (18)

Use VM Ware.
You can run a parallel windows virtual machine with all your files on that and also you can still use windows for previous programs you have installed.

Best of both world

I have 2 macs, one running windows, works well..

Neel

JackClark

How to transfer data from a PC to a Macintosh

Markus

The method I use to get data from a PC to a Mac is to get a USB enclosure and open up the PC, pull the drive from it, pop it in an enclosure and then connect that to the Mac. It'll act like a normal external disk.

Viruses from a PC won't infect Mac OS X, so I would not worry about that to be honest. The only real worry would be if you happened to send an infected file from your Mac to a windows PC as it could infect it. If you really want to run an AV check on your mac then grab a copy of ClamXav. It's a free virus checker for the mac

You could do it via ethernet, but the problem is you'd need to setup networking, which could be simple, then again, perhaps not so simple, depends on your setup. Popping the drive in a "caddy" is probably the best way to go.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Shouldn't you use AV when using windows virtual machine?

Markus

Oh hell yes! If you are planning to use boot camp (dual boot - OS x and windows) or a virtual machine solution with windows then you would be foolish to run it without any av or anti malware software installed.
My point was that if you are running OS x then you don't have to run av but you can if you want

Dingdongler

Thanks guys.

I don't want to actually run windows, just office, which I'm in the process of trying to get hold off.

I also don't want to start opening up my pc to get the hard drive out, not something I've ever done before. If i damage it I'm buggered.

I have an external hard drive that I bought for the PC. Can I download the PC data onto it and then upload it onto my Mac? I mean, I know I can, but would this be a very slow way to do it?

Thanks again, I'm loving the Mac btw. Its sooooo nice to use!

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Depends on how much data you have to copy. Over USB, the average external hard disk caddy will only copy data at around 12MB/sec - depending on the quality of the external HD unit (as opposed to around 70+MB/sec for an average drive over SATAII ).

So its takes about 1.5 minutes per gigabyte of data

Therefore 20 gig isn't going to too much fuss (half an hour to copy on to it, and another to copy off again). But if you have a terrabyte of data to copy your looking at up to 26 hours to copy to the USB drive, and another 26hours to copy off it again.

Gigabit LAN is another option which is faster than USB2.0, and would also allow direct copying directly between both machines (once file sharing is set up) without needing to disassemble them (assuming your PC has a gigabit LAN card; most have them built in these days), but you will need the appropriate gigabit LAN router to support those speeds.

However, you mentioned that your PC maybe infected with a virus/malware. If so, this can often increase transfer rates exponentially, as the computer is bogged down doing other tasks.

Hanley

I wouldn't worry too much about transfer times...

Set it off before you go to bed...you get up in the morning and job done.