Mac Viruses?

I was advised to deny access to allow the new version to access to my keychain items and that the possibility of a virus existed and to run an anti-viral program based out of .mac (to which I don't have an account).

Who or what "advised" you do do all that?

There is no anti-malware program based out of .Mac (at least not for many years). And the service is not even called .Mac anymore. It's MobileMe.

So wherever that advice came from, it is probably very old.

Although there are some Trojan malware out there for Mac OS X (relatively rare), there are no known viruses. You can check for malware using a freeware scanning program, ClamXav.

http://www.clamxav.com/

There are many other reason your iMac G5 may be running slow, all more likely than a Mac OS X "virus."

Here are some general things you should do or check:

Insufficient free space - Make sure your hard drive (the startup volume) is not getting too full. It should have at least 15% of its capacity as free space, and even more would be better. Mac OS X uses free space for its hidden virtual memory swap files, and it cannot operate efficiently once free space becomes low and/or fragmented into small pieces. If your iMac runs better immediately after a restart, but gets slower through use, this is likely to be the problem.

Disk data corruption - To check for this, you need to start up from your Mac OS X installation disc. When you get to Installer's first screen, go up to the menu bar. Under Utilities, select to run Disk Utility. Use +Repair Disk+ on your startup drive. Note if any errors are reported. If there are errors, note if Disk Utility reports them being repaired successfully. Quit Disk Utility and restart normally.

Reset PRAM - It is generally a good idea to try this when trouble-shooting.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

Run +Repair Disk Permissions+ in Disk Utility, which you said was already performed. You should run the Repair instead of the Verify.

It is possible that there is a hardware problem with your hard drive that is causing this problem, so you should back up your personal data as soon as possible.

If the issue persists, please post back.

Hi, Terry27 ,

your problem might have different causes. Most easy to check would be if your disk is running full, and if your RAM is sufficient.

Can you give more info on your iMac: which model, how much space has the harddisk and how much is used, and how much RAM. The first info you can see under "Apple-Menu -> "about=this-Mac", then click "more Info" and the corresponding items.
for the info about the used memory and diskspace, please start "Activity Monitor" (in Applications -> Utilities), and click on the corresponding symbols.

finally, it would be good to know which applications you run, and how much memory they use. For example, if you have iPhoto open with 5000 pictures of 3 MB each, and want to go to your mail programme with many mails containing pictures, and have still other stuff open (internet browser with a long history, iTune, and others, ...) then your imac needs to write a lot of stuff to disk before it can switch from one application to the other.

Thus, my advice would be: close (by hand) all applications, restart, and start one application. Is the response fast, then it is ok. go on, start another one. keep an eye on the used Memory (Application monitor).

There could be other reasons, but this is the most probable.

Please, post back with more info, and we will be ble to help you

Thomas

Lack of RAM would result in more use of virtual memory, so access speed of the hard drive would be more critical. Therefore, if there is disk data corruption, that may cause problems with access speed. So I would run the check mentioned in my previous post, by starting up from your Mac OS X installation disc and running Disk Utility +Repair Disk+.

Also, it is possible your hard drive is becoming physically faulty, which would also affect access speeds. Therefore, if you do not have a recent backup of your user data (such as those songs in iTunes), I would do a backup immediately.

More RAM would definitely help. However, if things were working acceptably before, I would suspect some type of problem if you are constantly getting the +beach ball+ now.

I would not do that, because the version of Disk Utility is different. It is not a good idea to give away the Mac OS X installation disc of your current system. For one thing, you cannot run repair on your startup volume or reinstall if necessary. And from a legal standpoint, if you gave the disc away so that someone else can install Tiger, you also gave away your license to use Tiger.

You may be able to accomplish the same thing doing a +Safe Boot+ and by +using fsck+. You can refer to this article.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417