etrecheck... Mac running slow

Mac OS does not require nor does it benefit in ANY way by installing any of the following types of third party apps:

• Antivirus
• Security
• VPN
• Cleaning
• Maintenance

at best Total AV is worthless and at worst is:

A: the source of your issue

B. Damaging Mac OS

uninstall Total AV per the developers instructions, restart in Safe Mode, restart normally and test.

If you've been trying to remove F-Secure or Total AV manually, you'll probably have to start over.

Reinstall Total AV, and then remove it properly via their instructions.

F-Secure has this page for removing its app. Click on the download button for their removal script. If you've manually removed some F-Secure items, you may need to reinstall the app, first. Scripts will sometimes fail (with our without error messages) to remove everything if pieces it expects to find are missing.

A large part of your issue is the garbage AV apps. And unless you actually need a VPN for a direct tunneled connection for work or a school, those are also useless. Despite the ads you see for them, VPNs are not, in any way, security software.

Remove:

DuckDuckGo VPN Network Extension

Anything to do with F-Secure

Anything to do with Total AV

Chrome and its daemons

Cleaner One (and the Pro version)

Read the following for information on why AV is not needed at all, and why VPNs are not security software.

What is malware? - Apple Community

Why you (and actually, no one) should ever use Chrome:

I really don't get what people think is so great about Chrome. It's a known, massive resource hog. On top of that, from the moment you turn your Mac on to the time you turn it off, it is constantly sending anonymized data of your computer and web usage to Google's servers. Chrome doesn't even have to be running. The keystone agents…

/Library/LaunchDaemons/google.keystone.agent.plist

/Library/LaunchDaemons/google.keystone.xpcservice.plist

…do that by launching apps buried within the Chrome app, which load at startup. And then there's this.

We don't allow any software written by Google on our Macs. Not Chrome, Google Earth, or anything else. Google's real business is collecting marketing data. You are their unwilling and unpaid source for it when you use any of their junk. If Safari isn't a browser you care much for, try Firefox or Brave. If you have one, you do not need Chrome to access your Google/Gmail account. You can do that from any browser.

Brave in particular is an excellent replacement for Chrome. It’s built on the same open-source Chromium web code, but without any of Google Chrome’s intrusive data harvesting. What makes it a better alternative are dumb web sites (like some banks) which insist you use Chrome for access. In almost all cases, Brave also works.

And yet another reason to never allow any app written by Google on your computer.

Google told users that when using incognito/private mode, Chrome would not track your usage, or collect data. They lied. It did anyway. Google has now agreed to settle the 2020 lawsuit with a five billion dollar fine.

But even so, according to another article on the lawsuit, that 5 billion is still a drop in the bucket to what Google has made on the collected data.

Remove Chrome and its daemons. Never install it again.

The idea is to copy and paste the report here so others can see what's running on your Mac.

Make sure to use the Additional text box as the reports are usually too many characters for the main editing window.

Nothing will change until you remove the useless security apps both rkaufmann87 and I recommended.

All they do is eat up system resources while doing nothing useful in return. On top of that, you've made it worse by having more than one AV title running.

I decided too say: eff it! and so I reformatted my Mac after backing up my data…

Well, that will certainly clear things.

The very important part then is to NOT restore the backup in any automated fashion. That will just put everything back to where it was. You'll have to manually copy back important data.

Kurt Lang wrote:

And yet another reason to never allow any app written by Google on your computer.

Google told users that when using incognito/private mode, Chrome would not track your usage, or collect data. They lied. It did anyway. Google has now agreed to settle the 2020 lawsuit with a five billion dollar fine.

Another, more recent settlement, demonstrating their clear intent to continue lying about it:

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-secures-historic-1375-billion-settlement-google-related-texans-data

The settled amount is slightly more than one day's revenue.

The same people concerned about "viruses" insist upon installing Google. Is there any better illustration of cognitive dissonance?

Some actual numbers for their marketing haul. That's incredible! The article I referred to only mentioned a "drop in the bucket", but not compared to a figure.

I've never looked to see why Google's Chrome is so heavily used. I don't see advertisements to push that crappy browser any more than I do Firefox, Brave, Opera, Safari, Firefox, and whatever else. Do schools tell their students to use it? No idea.

It does irk me a bit when we go to see our financial manager. Every person on their staff uses Chrome. For financials!

I recently had a problem with a particular US government agency's website, which took several layers of tech support to get to their final solution — which was to use Chrome. They absolutely positively insisted Chrome was required and that no other browser would work regardless of the platform. No Safari no Firefox no Brave. No Opera no Vivaldi and definitely no DuckDuckGo. This occupied several hours of phone support from real live English speaking human beings over a period of days.

I persisted. They stonewalled. It's Chrome or nothing.

Guess what, in the end it was defective website code. They fixed it.

This is a very high profile government agency.

By the way Chrome wouldn't have worked either.

The brainwashing is incredible.

Unreal, but also completely believable.

The brainwashing is incredible.

I do wonder if this is a subversive effort by Google to control the web.

Microsoft tried to do this with ActiveX, which only existed on Windows computers in Internet Explorer. If they could get enough web designers to use ActiveX, then having a Windows computer would be required to use the internet.