Q: MacBook Pro Suddenly Running Slowly

It took 61 minutes to complete EtreCheck.

It sounds like your hard drive may be failing. You have not rebooted in 15 hours. Will your computer start up?

If you do not have a current backup, this would be a good time to make one.

Try booing into the Recovery Partition by holding down the Command and R keys at startup. OS X Recovery

After the Recovery menu appears, select Disk Utility.

See the following link: Check Hard Drive Health of a Mac with Disk Utility: Check Hard Drive Health of a Mac with Disk Utility

See running Disk Utility to check your startup disk: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks

Kim

There are a few unusual things:

Adware: ⓘ

    ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Extensions/Omnibar.safariextension

    One adware file found. [Remove]

also this extension did not load. Its driver is likely outdated, this can cause internal hangs waiting for things that cannot happen, because there is no driver:

Kernel Extensions: ⓘ

        /System/Library/Extensions

    [not loaded]    com.xxxchurch.x3nke (1.0.2 - SDK 10.7 - 2016-02-26) [Support]

you also have a lot of app crashes due to suggestd. This is related to spotlight suggestions. you may want to use system preferences > spotlight to reduce the number and type of solutions it is making.

When you see a beachball cursor or the slowness is especially bad, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.  

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.

Launch the Console application in any one of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

          SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

          View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.

Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.

Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

When you post the log extract, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

If you have an account on Pastebin, please don't select Private from the Paste Exposure menu on the page, because then no one but you will be able to see it.

Hello Grant,

Early on, I had modified EtreCheck's adware detection so that it would be more compatible with AdwareMedic. I didn't want people to run EtreCheck, detect adware, and then have AdwareMedic say there wasn't any adware. But as I enhanced EtreCheck's adware capabilities, it diverged significantly from AdwareMedic/MalwareBytes so there was no point in trying to be compatible MalwareBytes' detection logic anymore.

So, I have restored some of EtreCheck's original adware detection functionality. In this case, it is detecting an adware Safari extension that only exists in cache. It probably isn't loaded in Safari anymore, but there is no way for EtreCheck to say for sure without digging into the user's keychain, and I don't want to go there. This isn't an EtreCheck vs. MalwareBytes issue either. I'm confident that MalwareBytes would have correctly removed the adware. But there are lots more anti-malware apps and many of them are just scam-ware.

So, EtreCheck now plays it safe. If it sees adware that it thinks it can delete safely, it will offer to do so. At this point, it may be just a harmless file on the user's hard disk, but deleting it may help avoid confusion in the future.

hey, etresoft!

So, EtreCheck now plays it safe. If it sees adware that it thinks it can delete safely, it will offer to do so.

Thanks for the extra explanation. I like your tool and I think it has a lot to offer, especially in uncovering what may be added to a system and a quick look at how its performing that does not require a degree in computer science.

I see this and several other tools as detective's helpers. The decisions and actions are still left to the user. Usually one adware will not kill performance or anything else, But I saw mention of adware in the report and wanted to point out that it had been seen.

I am more concerned that a Driver has not been loaded, and as KimUserName suggested, 61 minutes to run this really does suggest drive problems.

acm206 may also benefit from Linc Davis's offer to read a log from when the system is especially slow, which can sometimes zoom in on the issue at hand. in some cases, even better than all the other tools combined. But sometimes those logs are just baffling.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

 

But I saw mention of adware in the report and wanted to point out that it had been seen.

Yes. This is one of those situations where EtreCheck just reports what it finds. There is a possibility that it could cause some problems, but, in this case, isn't related to the primary issue.

I am more concerned that a Driver has not been loaded, and as KimUserName suggested, 61 minutes to run this really does suggest drive problems.

Yes. Unfortunately, as is typically the case, acm206 doesn't have a Time Machine backup. Kudos to KimUserName for jumping on that.

After making a backup, I think the next step would be to remove that X3Watch (http://x3watch.com/) software. acm206 says the problem happened suddenly. Maybe the hard drive failed. But maybe the driver failed. A low-level system modification like that can cause all kinds of problems.

acm206 may also benefit from Linc Davis's offer to read a log from when the system is especially slow, which can sometimes zoom in on the issue at hand. in some cases, even better than all the other tools combined. But sometimes those logs are just baffling.

Yes. Hopefully acm206 can pinpoint exactly when the problem happened.