Mac locking up for no reason

Security experts might disagree on the point about Bitdefender not being necessary. Mac is being targeted more often lately. Just boils down to how careful you are, I suppose.

Anyway, this discussion is not about malware, but random lockups. We should keep this on-topic.

I mean, I suppose it's worth a shot, even though CMM has never caused problems before. The lockups are quite infrequent, but always frustrating.

How do forum-goers feel about Bitdefender?

And what are some recommended apps to remove an app's related files? I hate just dragging apps to the trash can and leaving all their junk behind.

"MalwareBytes for Mac being the exception as its main function is to try and help clean up after the fact."

Clean up, meaning what? Bitdefender also quarantines files. MalwareBytes actually missed email files that contained malware, whereas Bitdefender caught them. Given, those attachments probably targeted Windows, but still, you don't want to accidentally forward something to someone else who might be running Windows.

"After over 40 years of computer usage, DOS/Windows/Mac, and never using any type of AV software, or ever having even one type of malware on any computer I've owned, I'd have to say I'm already more clever than they are."

Same here. I might've gotten hit with something once. The only reason I bought Bitdefender was because I run a small business now, and wanted an extra layer of protection. But you're probably right, it may be unnecessary.

CleanMyMac isn't even doing anything when the lockups occur. It's really more likely that it's Spotlight, but I'll keep an open mind and see what happens now that Spotlight is disabled. If I get another lockup, I'll uninstall CMM.

"It's almost a given that if the user has run a cleaning app, you must both remove that app, followed by a reinstall of the OS to undo the damage. And that's only the OS. It's still a game to figure out what third party apps it damaged. You basically end up reinstalling everything."

This seems like conjecture. Again, I hear a lot of talk about CMM damaging system files or whatever, but no one has any solid evidence, like "CMM removed /var/lib/blahblah.so when it wasn't supposed to." The claim is being made that CMM's devs don't know what they're doing, and as a software engineer myself, I'm pretty sure they've done their research and made sure it's safe to remove the files that are being removed when you run a cleanup. I mean, it's no secret what it'll remove, it literally shows you a list.

I also don't get when people say CMM is completely unnecessary. One time, I hadn't run it in quite awhile, and had about 10GB of junk wasting space (caches, old logs, etc). Evidently MacOS wasn't doing a great job at keeping that cleaned up. I also find CMM's old file cleanup tool really useful. Everything in the app allows opting out of cleaning up certain files or folders, so if you're careful and responsible about that, it shouldn't be an issue.

I'll give it a week or so and see if any more lockups occur.