Home Sharing from computer with virus

Question

We recently got a new Mac and my husband wants to move his iTunes music (much of it imported from CDs) from his (very) old Dell laptop. He thinks the laptop may have been infected with a virus or malware or something and he's afraid to move his music over. I don't know much about viruses but I thought the chance of transferring anything like that from a PC to a Mac was slim, especially when just transferring music from iTunes. To allay his fears, I'm hoping someone can confirm that using Home Sharing to move his music is unlikely to cause any problems. Thanks!

Answer 1

You don't have to worry about infecting the Mac. If he has files in his music library that are actually malicious executables masquerading as music files, or that somehow had malicious executables embedded within them, they would be Windows malware and wouldn't work on the Mac. But those files could infect another Windows PC in the future. Even that is fairly unlikely, though.
Since you're new Mac users, you should learn what the threats are and how to protect yourself. See my Mac Malware Guide.