I need to send in my laptop for repair, should i be worried about all the illegal music that is on it?

I think most people think of it less than you do, so the repairers see the same sort of stuff all the time. I think as long as you don’t have the entire Adobe Creative Suite from your dock, AppleiWork09[CRACK][K].dmg.tz.gzip, or weird porn on your desktop, you’ll be just fine.

Well, I know for dell, they actually tell you to take your hard drive out first.. which I would do if I needed repairs anywhere due to sensitive information and work related things.. It’s not hard on most laptops, but I have not worked on a mac laptop and judging from the way they are about using mac hardware, i doubt they would make it easy for you.

If this is not an option, I would find a way to remove all the files you do not want seen into an external hard drive, or burned to DVDs, and replace when it is returned to you.

There is probably nothing to worry about, but better safe than sorry, imo.

also stop using limewire, there are tons of viruses on there..

Don’t worry about torrent programs.. i use torrents on a regular basis, because many sites now are utilizing torrents in an effort to save on bandwidth and they are used for legitimate, completely legal downloads. Any program that has you download a ‘download manager’ in order to download their software (we’ll use WOW for instance, an example of something everyone knows what it is..) that is actually partly torrent-driven.

Geek Squad wouldn’t care. Apple might

Legal or illegal, I would take out all data (back it up or take hard drive out) from a unit before sending it out for repair, this way I don’t have to worry about anything at all…

Unless you have torrents or limewire running there’s really no way to prove you obtained the files illegally. And honestly its geeksquad not the riaa so I think you will be fine

Honestly, if you have something on there GeekSquad prob will find it. If you have some good pron, you may find them to be watching it, but as far as reporting you for your girl-on-girl collection, I think youll be fine – however I would always remove the hard drive beforehand..

@Violet is right, the guys at Geek Squad probably (emphasis on probably) won’t care, but if you send it into Apple they will delete all of your music. They won’t do anything to get you in trouble, but you will almost certainly lose your downloaded content. It’s happened to both of my brothers.

@drClaw I’ve had Apple work on my old MacBook before (with a ton of music obtained in various ways) and never had any of it go up missing.

Just make sure you have a full backup of your system, or at least anything that is important to you. Backups are a wonderful thing.

@justn I guess it must just be hit and miss then. Like you said “backups are a wonderful thing”

There has been a few reports of Best Buy employees snooping around on customer supplied hard drives, they have stolen homade porn, turned in a couple of pedophiles, and some other crap. Bottom line if you dont want them to see them then encrypt, delete or dont give them the HDD, you might get unlucky and some geek sqauad dude with a fake badge wiill think it gives them special “powers” and they will turn you in for having the files.

Music files may go un-noticed because so many people have them but you never know.

I’m pretty sure removing the hard drive will void your warranty, so unless it’s already expired I’d advise against removing it.
Also speaking from experience I’ve had Adobe suite and music on my iMac which was sent off for repairs, came back with everything in tact, this was a few years ago mind you.