how to remove adware and malware

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for Mac

First, never use any kind of "anti-virus" or "anti-malware" software on a Mac. That's how you cause problems, not how you solve them. It's unlikely that your problem is caused by malware in any case.

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 one 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.

If you have an account on Pastebin, please don't select Private from the Paste Exposure menu on the page, because then no one but you will be able to see it.

crocus99 wrote:

i am a computor newbie so the directions were a bit beyond my confidence level.

Given that, I would suggest that if you have adware concerns in the future, your best course of action would be to follow Carl's suggestion and run a scan with MalwareBytes: http://malwarebytes.org/antimalware/mac.

Your problem obviously had nothing to do with malware. Malware is easy to avoid. Just don't download any unknown software that you don't need, merely because some stranger on a website tells you to.

Hello crocus99,

While adware or scamware may very well be causing your problem, you haven't given us any real information to go on. If the problem isn't adware then MalwareBytes for Mac isn't going to help. I wrote a little diagnostic program to help show what might be causing these problems. Download EtreCheck from http://www.etrecheck.com, run it, and paste the results here. EtreCheck is perfectly safe to run, does not ask for your password to install, and is signed with my Apple Developer ID.

Disclaimer: Although EtreCheck is free, there are other links on my site that could give me some form of compensation, financial or otherwise.

Hello again crocus99,

There may be reasons why you are running out of RAM. If you post the report, we would have a better idea of what to suggest. Without that, all I can really do is make general suggestions based on what people typically say with a 2010 machine running 10.11.2 more slowly than they would like.

If you are running El Capitan on an older machine with only 4 GB RAM, then more RAM would probably help. But those machine are easily upgraded. As long as you are taking it apart, you might want to consider an SSD upgrade too. El Capitan and Yosemite before it are hybrids of OS X and iOS. They really run best with an SSD.

The 2 places I’ve seen recommended most to buy reliable RAM are below. I have purchased RAM several times from Other World Computing and have always been very satisfied with the product and service. They have on-line instructions on how to replace the RAM. OWC has also tested RAM above what Apple states is the maximum. I now have 6GB installed on a early 2008 iMac supposedly limited to 4 GB and noticed an improvement.

Crucial

Other World Computing

If the log won’t post, try posting it here and provide a link in a reply Pastebin

Another thing that slows down a computer is if the hard drive is nearly full. I would try to make sure you always have 20+ GB free.

Realize there is only so much you can do to speed up an old computer. Addressing issues such as too little RAM and a crowded drive can only do so much when the real issue is demands of newer software, more complex web sites, more demanding media formats.

malwarebytes runs only on 10.8 and higher according to their website and my experience.

That's the main reason I upgraded from 10.6.8 to el capitain

actually my computer is faster now too. yay.