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I have a Mac and I'm worried

Okay I am now officially worried and on the verge of panic.

Today I turned my computer on and for the first time since I bought it (which is less than two months ago) it took a very long time to load the desktop. I actually began wondering if it would load it at all.

I am now convinced that some sort of malware has gotten to my machine.


If anyone here knows of a very good program or security-check procedure for this kind of events, please let me know.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna give that Securemac a try.
 
Scrap it and get a Mac!

What? Oh.

Is it possible that this is some sort of disk failure developing? If it's only a couple of months old it might be worth checking this out and getting it fixed under warranty. If you took it to an Apple shop could they give it a once-over?
 
I had a very similar problem, and it turned out my hard drive was failing. Get all you can off of it and get it to the shop.
 
I just finished the scan with Macscan. All it found was 5 cookies. 4 of them from google. 1 from CNN (And I rarely visit the CNN website. Go figure!)
 
Ron_Tomkins said:
Okay I am now officially worried and on the verge of panic.

Today I turned my computer on and for the first time since I bought it (which is less than two months ago) it took a very long time to load the desktop. I actually began wondering if it would load it at all.

I am now convinced that some sort of malware has gotten to my machine.


If anyone here knows of a very good program or security-check procedure for this kind of events, please let me know.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna give that Securemac a try.
Click to expand...
Don't Panic!

That's may not mean anything at all. Sometimes this just happens. Mostly when you did major changes to the system (updates, (un-)installing lots of programs etc.), or did a "hard reset" or similar (turning it off without the proper shutdown procedure).

Run the Disk Utitlity, select your HD, run "Verify Disk" and see if there's some problem. (Assuming you have a backup, Time Machine or otherwise.)

To be on the safe side, you can do it after booting from an external HD (if you have made a bootable copy on it) or the Mac OS X Install or Repair disk. Press Alt after starting to select alternative boot drive.

Lastly, why turn it off anyway? My MacBook is either on or in sleep mode. I seldom restart, mostly after an update, or when I feel there's something awry. In my experience, Mac OS X does not corrupt itself while running.

Malware infection is very, very improbable.
 
elgarak said:
Don't Panic!

That's may not mean anything at all. Sometimes this just happens. Mostly when you did major changes to the system (updates, (un-)installing lots of programs etc.), or did a "hard reset" or similar (turning it off without the proper shutdown procedure).

Run the Disk Utitlity, select your HD, run "Verify Disk" and see if there's some problem. (Assuming you have a backup, Time Machine or otherwise.)

To be on the safe side, you can do it after booting from an external HD (if you have made a bootable copy on it) or the Mac OS X Install or Repair disk. Press Alt after starting to select alternative boot drive.

Lastly, why turn it off anyway? My MacBook is either on or in sleep mode. I seldom restart, mostly after an update, or when I feel there's something awry. In my experience, Mac OS X does not corrupt itself while running.

Malware infection is very, very improbable.
Click to expand...

I ran the Disk Utility and it didn't find anything wrong after the search (is it normal that all the time it was doing the verification, the cursor turned into the marble of doom?). However, I should point out that I haven't made any backups nor time machine.... flux capacitor... restore thingies.
 
Ron_Tomkins said:
I ran the Disk Utility and it didn't find anything wrong after the search (is it normal that all the time it was doing the verification, the cursor turned into the marble of doom?). However, I should point out that I haven't made any backups nor time machine.... flux capacitor... restore thingies.
Click to expand...

Yes, the disk is essentially taken off line for Disk Utility to verify that everything is kosher. If the filesystem were modified during the scan it might report false errors.

Disk Utility will also show you the S.M.A.R.T. status if your drive supports it. This is a self diagnostic that can supposedly tell you when your drive is about to fail. Actual failures however don't often give you enough warning to do anything about it. Google did a study of this not long ago that you could probably look up.

The long delay at startup is caused by the system repairing a corrupted file system. You can expect this if you don't shut down properly. Journaling helps prevent the delay by tracking what is about to be changed so the repairs are much quicker. But there could be a few cases where a full file system check is still required. Open the Console utility to see what your system has really been up to.
 
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Is it not still the case that one of the system DVDs that come with the machine also works as a hardware test? Have a look at your disks. If it says something like 'hold C to run hardware test', you can boot with it in the machine, and it'll run a self-test that would most probably detect bad RAM or a failing hd.
 
I've never seen a memory test that exercises ram as well as a modern OS. Except where the ram has outright failed which is easily detected by the startup diagnostics, the most common problems I've seen are intermittent failures due to refresh and timing issues. Both of these can pass exhaustive standalone memory diagnostics but will fail in a running system.

Running diagnostics on a failing HD is an excellent way to lose data.
 
I bow to your superior experience, Dan. (ETA: expertise, even)

I think, though, that this option - booting the hardware test disk - is likely near the top of the check-off list they use at Apple's call-in support.
 
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Ixion said:
On a Mac, hit Apple-Option-Esc to bring up the Force Quit menu. Then begin quitting applications until the system restores.
Click to expand...

Usually the list of programs to force quit will identify one as "not responding", and that's the one you should kill first.

By the way, "not responding" basically means that the program is not paying attention to the keyboard or mouse. Which might mean that it's stuck in a loop, or might mean that it's furiously doing useful work. Well-written programs try to keep responding even when they are working hard, but programmers are human.
 
Rule of thumb, load up as much RAM as you can, but you don't have to exceed 4 gigs as nothing yet can make use of that, *I'm not sure about Photoshop CS3 yet, CS2 could use 4 gigs*. File size and use of RAM are things Adobe upgrades with every new release, in fact their programs require more with all the crap they stuff into them.

iLife requires lots of RAM, especially if you author videos.

Try Opera as a browser and see what you think, I still use Safari with mixed results when animated gifs and movies are used on message boards, a loading delay would occur that Netscape handled differently. I used to stream gifs and QuickTime movies and Netscape was more stable to transfer the files to a server than Safari was.

NOTICE: QuickTime is now a target for virus writers, so that includes iTunes. DO program your Software Update to check twice a week.

I have to admit I browsed this thread and may have missed a bit of information. I've been working almost exclusively on a MAC since 90, and work it's fundamental advantage of video authoring, vector and photographic image creation, as well as rudimentary 3D scene design and rendering.

One other thing about the 'Force Quit', I get Adobe products experiencing this quite a bit, mostly Photoshop. You can prompt the force quit, and see Photoshop not responding, at that point I say to quit, and when it asks me if I'm sure, I cancel force quit and Photoshop more times than not will respond. You do not have to force quit a program that does not say it is not responding. Force quitting is basically a crash, but only for the program effected. Basically give the program the amount of time it would take to save the file opened, after this aborted force quit, and it mostly snaps back to functionality.

I avoid using Microsoft Entourage for our PC based eMail server because I experience loss of keyboard commands in applications, which renders them almost useless. That just could be a problem at work since very few of us use MACs.
 
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Ron,

The problem you are having is caused by the increasing RAM usage of Safari over time, trust me on this.

Safari starts out fine, but the longer you run it the more of a memory pig it becomes. When Safari starts to beachball it usually indicates that it is pigging out on so much memory that it needs to swap some to disk. When any computer running any operating system has to start swapping memory to disk, performance is the first thing that suffers. To get the best results from Safari I suggest you quit the program and then restart it once every day or two. Increasing the RAM in your computer might let you run Safari longer between beachball events.

You can very easily watch the memory being used with the Activity Monitor app that is located in Applications > Utilities. I always start this program first thing when I boot any of my many Macs. I keep it in my dock.

Do this to demonstrate what I am saying:

1. Start Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.app
2. If Safari is already running, observe how much memory it is using, if not start it and note that it is not using much memory, perhaps 100mb or less.
3. Visit 5 or 10 websites just as you normally would
4. Observe that now Safari is using more memory
5. Continue using Safari until it begins to beachball, then use Activity Monitor to see how much memory it is pigging out on. You will observe that it will be hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
6. You have now confirmed that the problem you are having = Safari is a RAM pig
7. Exit Safari, if you have multiple tabs or windows open, no worries, just exit
8. Restart Safari, drop-down History and select Reopen All Windows From Last Session
9. All your Safari windows and tabs are restored
10. Use Activity Monitor to see how much RAM Safari is using now, it is much, much less now because you restarted it

I find that on my Mac Pro with 8gb of memory, Safari begins to behave very badly when it gets up above 600mb of memory in use.

I make it my practice to restart Safari pro-actively when it hits about 600mb of physical RAM. I have seen it reach 1.5gb of physical RAM, which is very, very piggy. As I type this it has been running since yesterday and is currently pigging out on 510mb on this machine. It's due for a kick, er, I mean restart.
 
DoubtingStephen said:
I find that on my Mac Pro with 8gb of memory, Safari begins to behave very badly when it gets up above 600mb of memory in use.
Click to expand...

Why should occupying a mere 600 Mb on a system with 8 Gb cause such a problem ?

Unless, of course, you're running other stuff that's taking up most of the rest at the same time ... (but you don't say that).
 
Blue Bubble said:
Why should occupying a mere 600 Mb on a system with 8 Gb cause such a problem ?

Unless, of course, you're running other stuff that's taking up most of the rest at the same time ... (but you don't say that).
Click to expand...

I'm never running enough stuff to use all of the physical RAM, so the reason why Safari begins behaving badly when it is using very much RAM is apparently not because there is insufficient additional RAM available.

I do not know why it acts badly when it is pigging out on RAM, but I do know that it does.

Perhaps it gets so bloated that it begins to have trouble managing all of the RAM it is pigging out on.
 
I think one reason Safari slows with use is it is saving too many cache's and the your CPU has a small cache speed. There are ways to increase the cache speed out there or you can empty the cache by restarting the program. This is independent from RAM. Cache is something like a history that starts over with a new launch.

Photoshop is particularly greedy in stealing RAM for remembering all of the work you are doing in a session. If you really want to tax your system with Photoshop, make a very large pattern and save it for fill use. I found that out the slow way, and later saved the pattern as a file to store for if I would ever need to load it again.

Not sure if that helps anything, software today just stores too much information you rarely make use of. But it's really bizarre what you can find out minute by minute what your computer has been doing all day if you know where to look.
 
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