slow mac

1. Do not install Avast or any similarly categorized product.
   • Apply judicious skepticism to recommendations for commercial products and services posted to this site with extreme skepticism, whether they are "free" or not.
   • Apply the same circumspection to website links hosting advertisements. Merely loading some sites provides clickthrough revenue even if you don't buy those products.
   • Rule 1 of Macs is don't install junk.
2. Do follow macjack's instructions.

Please download and run EtreCheck, created by one of own helpers here in ASC. It is a diagnostic tool that's very useful to us in finding problems. Also it will give us further specs on your Mac. After it runs post the log file here. It will contain no personal information.

The IT Guys (WA) are all Apple qualified technicians and deal with lots of Macs having such problems.

Don't go downloading any "bloatware" utilities as suggested by other "experts" trying to sell their products.

You may get some insights from our post here

http://www.itguyswa.com.au/why-is-my-mac-slow/

As we say reason could be any number of things but check HDD space first, remove all the bloat-ware utilities and make sure that the update didnt "fail" or partially fail. I take it your Mac is post 2009 and has 4GB of RAM?

We put AVG (AVAST) on all Mac's that come into our shop and have never had a problem with the FREE Mac Version.

We don't have any experience with the paid Mac version but we are hoping to evaluate in the near future to see how effective it is against phishing links in Mail which is a clear weakness in Mac OS and doesn't appear to be high on Apple's radar of things to fix.

We also sell AVG Cloudcare (Now Avast Cloudcare) for Windows computers and have experienced a number of issues regarding firewall configuration with the latest version but the January update is scheduled to address those issues.

IT Guys wrote:

We put AVG (AVAST) on all Mac's that come into our shop and have never had a problem with the FREE Mac Version.

That's interesting because users we've seen here have lots of issues with Avast. IMO it's one of the worst. You also state that Macs can and do get viruses. That is technically incorrect, unless you mean the false positives Avast is renowned for. There are NO viruses that affect Mac OS. There are other forms of malware but not if users are careful what they download. If someone does get fooled into installing malware there are only 2 programs I would trust. Malwarebytes and Etrecheck.

Also, it seems you are selling something. We are not.

Just a thought. I see your reply contains advertising for AVG (avast). Many people here consider Avast as suspect. Did you overlook putting it down as a reason?