M2 Macbook Air has Heavy CPU Usage (EntreCheck report included)

It looks like you didn't uninstall Camo Studio. The app is missing, but the system extension is still running trying to load the app.

You have MalwareBytes running in the background. There is no utility in that.

I wouldn't run an ad blocker as a kernel extension. By hacking the kernel with an extension, you reduce the security, not improve it.

You have a ton of stuff running in the background. No idea if it is providing any benefit to you.

You are running NordVPN, so you are tunneling all of your surfing habits into a neat little package for them to sell off at a premium prices.

photolibraryd will run pretty hard until it indexes all the faces and objects in your photos.

I. not in your report the section " Unsigned files - There are unsigned software files installed. These files could be old, incompatible, and cause problems. There is well know Intels apps seem to eat all RAM they can! So get rid of Intel only applications and see if that speeds up your Mac!

How do I remove kernels and extensions? I uninstalled Camp using the uninstall agent it came with, so there shouldn't be anything left over from it.

Have you restarted since you uninstalled it? It may just still be loaded. You can try looking in /Library/Extensions if you have restarted.

Also I thought NordVPN was good and didn't sell your data?

That's what they claim, but they also claim there are millions of people trying to collect on you all of the time. That's not true, either. They use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt as their advertising push. I don't trust anyone that does that. There is no way you can verify they are not collecting and selling it. iCloud Private Browsing does the same for you and Apple has no idea what goes through those relays.

Re: Items running in the background: in settings, i can't actually click on any of the applications that "open at login" to remove them

Why can't you click on them? Are they grayed out?

If the apps are running with an icon in the Dock, you can ctrl-click on the icon and remove it from Open at Login.

Apps can bypass that system to open at login, but they should provide a preference setting to disable opening at login. Some system modifications wouldn't work at all if they didn't start at login.

, and I see two versions of Grammarly in the "running in the background" list. How do I get rid of those from the list entirely?

You would have to uninstall the apps that put the background agents in there. They may have two different ones running. A lot of apps run an update checker in the background, and Grammarly may have some other service that runs in the background to do what it does. Those could be controlled by launchd plists in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchAgents, or /Library/LaunchDaemons. They can also embed those background items in the app itself. In that case, they should have a preference setting to disable it. However, I would imagine Grammarly wouldn't work at all without its background process.

iammultitudes wrote:

How do I remove kernels and extensions? I uninstalled Camp using the uninstall agent it came with, so there shouldn't be anything left over from it.

Also I thought NordVPN was good and didn't sell your data?

Okay, even if we assume the VON vendors are not… misrepresenting… their data collection habits… as a number no-logging VPN providers have already been caught logging when their non-existent logs were ill-secured and leaked onto the ‘net… please consider exactly what benefit you are obtaining from that first-few-hops VPN tunnel wrapping your existing end-to-end secure connections in a second and weaker tunnel, causing all of your traffic to be personally identified and centralized for… I’m sure there are reasons.

Outside of geolocation shifting for website and CDN testing and such, add-on first-few-hops VPNs (badly) protect you against a problem that really hasn’t existed for a decade or so.

This what EtreCheck shows as running for Camo:

com.reincubate.macos.cam.avextension - version

I don’t know what it is, but perhaps another app extension to keep camo alive.