Q: Can somebody please check this Etrecheck?

The big thing I see is that your computer has 4GB of RAM and due to insufficient RAM a large number of background processes have been killed. It is time to upgrade memory or revert to an earlier less memory hungry OS. What I’ve noticed of the last 10 years or so is that new versions of the OS tend to be more efficient than the last in terms of speed but that each new OS upgrade increases its memory footprint. Sometimes that increase doesn’t have an affect that we notice, sometimes it does, but the accumulative affect is noticeable.

In the middle of the Launch Agents list there’s one process not found - I’m not sure what that is. I’ll let someone else chime in there. I also see you’ve not configured TimeMachine. I do hope you are using some kind of backup system.

1. Back up your Mac if you have not done so already. To learn how to use Time Machine read Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac - Apple Support.
2. Uninstall "CleanMyMac 3". Read below. Do not install it, or anything like it, ever again. Depending on what you used it to do to your Mac, it may be necessary to erase that Mac and reconfigure it according to the instructions below the horizontal line that follows.
3. In addition, that Mac's Hosts file appears to have been modified. Fixing a modified Hosts file requires specific instructions. Apple Support Communities contributor and EtreCheck author etresoft recently added a User Tip discussing that concern, and how to correct it: Fixing a hacked /etc/hosts file
4. More memory will almost certainly be beneficial, given that you appear to be using Adobe, Google and Microsoft products known for their inefficiency in OS X:
   • Other than Apple there are only two vendors with which I have personal experience and can recommend: Crucial and OWC. People have reported problems with many other brands, yet Crucial and OWC's prices are as good as any you are likely to find. You may also find brands recommended by other ASC contributors but I have no experience with them.
   • Google products including Google Chrome will burden any Mac regardless of its age or configuration. Chrome's sole purpose for existing is to harvest your personal information so that Google can sell it. Read http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/09/Google-brings-you-closer-to-your-customers.h tml  to learn the extent to which they do that. It does so by infesting a Mac with a plethora of constantly running resource-intensive root level system modifications in the same manner as a "computer virus" would, if such a thing were to exist on a Mac, which it doesn't. Read Apps can affect Mac performance, battery runtime, temperature, and fan activity - Apple Support. Read http://betanews.com/2015/08/06/dump-google-chrome-to-extend-your-macbooks-batter y-life/ for one of many such reports regarding Google Chrome.
   • Google has yet to demonstrate the ability or apparent desire to write efficient OS X apps. If you are required to use Google products, expect a very limited useful economic life from your hardware investment.
5. Other problems exist, including but not limited to troublesome and useless products such as "Bit Defender", "SIMBL", and "Trend Micro". Do not reinstall them. Reinstall only what you need. You need no "anti-virus", "cleaning", or "scanning" programs. Using them will only burden a Mac's limited resources, degrading its performance while conveying no benefit.

To remove CleanMyMac 3 itself, use its Uninstaller module, followed by these additional steps:

• Remove the file ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.macpaw.CleanMyMac3.Scheduler.plist

  • To navigate to that file, copy and paste the following line into the Finder's Go menu > Go To Folder...

~/Library/LaunchAgents/

• Locate the following file and drag it to the Trash:

com.macpaw.CleanMyMac3.Scheduler.plist

• Then, open  (Apple menu) > System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items.
• Select the item CleanMyMac3 Menu
• Click the [—] (minus) button.
• Restart your Mac.

Beware that reinstalling OS X alone will have no effect on either removing CleanMyMac or reversing the damage it is capable of inflicting upon a system. To recover from the effects of having used it to modify OS X, the additional software you require and the essential files you need, follow the applicable recovery procedure below:

• If you have a backup that you created prior to using CleanMyMac, now is the time to use it. For Time Machine, boot OS X Recovery, and at the Mac OS X Utilities screen, choose Restore from Time Machine Backup. Choose a date preceding the installation of CleanMyMac.
• If you do not have a backup that predates the use of CleanMyMac, create one now. To do that read Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac.
  • The recovery procedure will require that you erase the Mac using OS X Recovery, and then create a new User Account whose contents will be empty. You will then be able to use Setup Assistant to migrate your essential documents including photos, music, work products and other essential files.
  • To erase and install OS X read How to reinstall OS X on your Mac.
    • Follow the instructions in that document under Erase your drive and install OS X.
    • Then, follow the procedure in Move your content to a new Mac.
    • When asked how you want to transfer your information, select Transfer from a Mac, Time Machine backup, or startup disk.
    • Under Select the Information to Transfer, select only your previous User account and do not select "Applications", "Computer and Network Settings" or "Other files and folders". De-select those choices.
  • Subsequent to using Setup Assistant, you will need to reinstall the essential software you may require, once again remembering to install software only from their original sources, and omitting all non-essential software.
  • "Non-essential software" is a broad category that includes but is not limited to third party "cleaning", "maintenance", and "anti-virus" products.

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 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.

1. This procedure is a diagnostic test. It changes nothing, for better or worse, and therefore will not, in itself, solve the problem. But with the aid of the test results, the solution may take a few minutes, instead of hours or days.

The test works on OS X 10.7 ("Lion") and later. I don't recommend running it on older versions of OS X. It will do no harm, but it won't do much good either.

Don't be put off by the complexity of these instructions. The process is much less complicated than the description. You do harder tasks with the computer all the time.

2. If you don't already have a current backup, back up all data before doing anything else. The backup is necessary on general principle, not because of anything in the test procedure. Backup is always a must, and when you're having any kind of trouble with the computer, you may be at higher than usual risk of losing data, whether you follow these instructions or not.

There are ways to back up a computer that isn't fully functional. Ask if you need guidance.

3. Below are instructions to run a UNIX shell script, a type of program. As I wrote above, it changes nothing. It doesn't send or receive any data on the network. All it does is to generate a human-readable report on the state of the computer. That report goes nowhere unless you choose to share it. If you prefer, you can act on it yourself without disclosing the contents to me or anyone else.

You should be wondering whether you can believe me, and whether it's safe to run a program at the behest of a stranger. In general, no, it's not safe and I don't encourage it.

In this case, however, there are ways for you to decide whether the program is safe without having to trust me. First, you can read it. Unlike an application that you download and click to run, it's transparent, so anyone with the requisite skill can verify what it does.

You may not be able to understand the script yourself. But variations of it have been posted on this website thousands of times over a period of years. The site is hosted by Apple, which does not allow it to be used to distribute harmful software. Any one of the millions of registered users could have read the script and raised the alarm if it was harmful. Then I would not be here now and you would not be reading this message. See, for example, this discussion.

Another indication that the test is safe can be found in this thread, and this one, for example, where the comment in which I suggested it was recommended by one of the Apple Community Specialists, as explained here.

Nevertheless, if you can't satisfy yourself that these instructions are safe, don't follow them. Ask for other options.

4. Here's a general summary of what you need to do, if you choose to proceed:

☞ Copy a particular line of text to the Clipboard.

☞ Paste into the window of another application.

☞ Wait for the test to run. It usually takes a few minutes.

☞ Paste the results, which will have been copied automatically, back into a reply on this page.

These are not specific instructions; just an overview. The details are in parts 7 and 8 of this comment. The sequence is: copy, paste, wait, paste again. You don't need to copy a second time.

5. Try to test under conditions that reproduce the problem, as far as possible. For example, if the computer is intermittently slow, run the test during a slowdown.

You may have started up in safe mode. If the system is now in safe mode and works well enough in normal mode to run the test, restart as usual before running it. If you can only test in safe mode, do that.

6. If you have more than one user, and only one user is affected by the problem,, and the affected user is not an administrator, then please run the test twice: once while logged in as the affected user, and once as an administrator. The results may be different. The user that is created automatically on a new computer when you start it for the first time is an administrator. If you can't log in as an administrator, test as the affected user. Most personal Macs have only one user, and in that case this section doesn’t apply. Don't log in as root.

7. Load this linked web page (on the website "Pastebin.") The title of the page is "Diagnostic Test." Below the title is a text box headed by three small icons. The one on the right represents a clipboard. Click that icon to select the text, then copy it to the Clipboard on your computer by pressing the key combination command-C.

If the text doesn't highlight when you click the icon, select it by triple-clicking anywhere inside the box. Don't select the whole page, just the text in the box.

8. Launch the built-in Terminal application in any 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.

Click anywhere in the Terminal window to activate it. Paste from the Clipboard into the window by pressing command-V, then press return. The text you pasted should vanish immediately.

9. If you see an error message in the Terminal window such as "Syntax error" or "Event not found," enter

exec bash

and press return. Then paste the script again.

10. If you're logged in as an administrator, you'll be prompted for your login password. Nothing will be displayed when you type it. You will not see the usual dots in place of typed characters. Make sure caps lock is off. Type carefully and then press return. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you make three failed attempts to enter the password, the test will run anyway, but it will produce less information. If you don't know the password, or if you prefer not to enter it, just press return three times at the password prompt. Again, the script will still run.

If the test is taking much longer than usual to run because the computer is very slow, you might be prompted for your password a second time. The authorization that you grant by entering it expires automatically after five minutes.

If you're not logged in as an administrator, you won't be prompted for a password. The test will still run. It just won't do anything that requires administrator privileges.

11. The test may take a few minutes to run, depending on how many files you have and the speed of the computer. A computer that's abnormally slow may take longer to run the test. While it's running, a series of lines will appear in the Terminal window like this:

[Process started]

        Part 1 of 8 done at … sec
        …
        Part 8 of 8 done at … sec

        The test results are on the Clipboard.

        Please close this window.

[Process completed]

The intervals between parts won't be exactly equal, but they give a rough indication of progress. The total number of parts may be different from what's shown here.

Wait for the final message "Process completed" to appear. If you don't see it within about ten minutes, the test probably won't complete in a reasonable time. In that case, press the key combination control-C or command-period to stop it. Then go to the next step. You'll have incomplete results, but still something. If you close the Terminal window while the test is still running, the partial results won't be saved and you'll have to start over.

12. When the test is complete, or if you stopped it because it was taking too long, quit Terminal. The results will have been saved to the Clipboard automatically. They are not shown in the Terminal window. Please don't copy anything from there. All you have to do is start a reply to this comment and then paste by pressing command-V again.

At the top of the results, there will be a line that begins with the words "Start time." If you don't see that, but instead see a mass of gibberish, you didn't wait for the "Process completed" message to appear in the Terminal window. Please wait for it and try again.

If any private information, such as your name or email address, appears in the results, anonymize it before posting. Usually that won't be necessary.

13. When you post the results, 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 software that runs this website. Please post the test results on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

14. This is a public forum, and others may give you advice based on the results of the test. They speak for themselves, not for me. The test itself is harmless, but whatever else you're told to do may not be. For others who choose to run it, I don't recommend that you post the test results on this website unless I asked you to.

______________________________________________________________

Copyright © 2014, 2015 by Linc Davis. As the sole author of this work (including the referenced "Diagnostic Test"), I reserve all rights to it except as provided in the Use Agreement for the Apple Support Communities website ("ASC"). Readers of ASC may copy it for their own personal use. Neither the whole nor any part may be redistributed.

And Bit Defender did find a 'suspicious file' which ended on .exe and removed it during a 'deep system check' (I remember it being located somewhere in Dropbox directory files). Could this have been something that added to my problem or is the whole application complete nonsense?

The whole application is complete nonsense. "exe" files do not run on Macs and can have no effect on it. All BitDefender will do is waste your time.

I am mainly using Chrome because of the compatibility with Google Drive and Agenda and Docs etc (and also a few extensions that make my life a lot easier), because it is widely used in my workplace, but it does seem to take about 90% of my CPU and a lot of memory according to Activity Monitor. Is Safari not known to have that problem?

If you are required to use Google products, all those caveats will apply: they modify a Mac at a privileged level, demanding full time root access to its operating system for reasons known only to Google. Its multitude of processes, "helpers" and its automatic updating service will have a detrimental effect on any Mac's performance regardless of its age or configuration. No product does that as extensively as Google. They don't care if it makes your Mac run poorly. That concern is unrelated to their reasons for developing their products. Your workplace might be fond of Google because it is "free", but "free" has a price – one that I am not willing to pay.

Apple developed Safari specifically for Apple devices. They are far more interested in performance and efficiency than any other vendor. They are also maniacally obsessed about keeping your personal information secure, because it's what they believe their customers want... or will want, when they eventually learn the extent to which their personal information is being used.

Regarding the complete new install, is this an essential step or is there a way around it?

It's up to you, but that is what I would do if it were my Mac. It also has the advantage of being unequivocally supported by Apple's published documentation and will obviate any concerns about the effects of having used "cleaning" products, or any inability to find and properly uninstall them (such as Trend Micro or SIMBL).

I basically back up my mac manually with an external hard drive (only files in Documents, Photos etc), could I use this for the new install too or do I need a proper back-up with Time Machine?

Time Machine is only one option. If you are using a different backup strategy that meets your requirements, that's OK.

Hello Yvette9510,

You've been given some very good advice so far in this thread.

The only thing I can add is that you should consider replacing your hard drive with a newer SSD version. Yosemite, released a year ago, and the latest El Capitan are hybrids of iOS and OS X. They were designed for machines that have SSD drives. They run more more slowly on older machines that have mechanical hard drives like the one your MacBook Pro has. If you are considering a memory upgrade, you should consider replacing your hard drive with an SSD as well. 500 GB SSD drives are quite affordable right now.

Furthermore, those old mechanical hard drives will wear out eventually. The tiny, 2.5" hard drives in notebook computers like your MacBook Pro tend to fail after 2-3 years. Before I switched to SSDs, I replaced my hard drives every two years, whether they needed it or not. Whatever you do, a good backup should be your first priority.

Finally, you might also want to consider a new machine. There are other parts that can fail over time too. My old 2011 machine runs great and super fast with the Samsung SSD. But sometimes the "a" and "s" keys don't want work. It is still usable, but I don't know if I want to put any more money into it. My 2014 Retina MacBook Pro is much nicer and under warranty until 2018.

Your MBP will accept up to 16 GB RAM.  Make certain that the specifications are;  204-pin PC-10600 (1333 MHz) DDR3 SO-DIMM.  The best sources of Mac compatible RAM are OWC and Crucial. 

Ciao.

A matched pair of RAM modules will allow for best performance, but yes a mismatched pair will work.  There will be an overall improvement in performance but there will be about a 10%+ degradation of performance compared to an equivalent matched pair.

Ciao.