Good overall malware/virus/cleaner app for Mac?

February 13, 2022 10:51 AM

MY 9 year old Mac is getting very slow at times and occasionally restarts itself on its own. I'm running OS 10.15.6 and things are just generally sluggish. Photoshop struggles badly often despite having plenty of free space allotted to it.

Can anyone recommend a reliable program I can run to detect and fix any possible virus or third party conflicts or other things that could be bogging it down (aside from its age)? I use Disk Utility and Onyx currently. Thanks.

posted by Liquidwolf to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

With a 9-year-old Mac I would assume you have a mechanical hard drive that is showing its age and/or you don't have enough RAM for the tasks you're doing. Before you put a lot of money or time into anything related to improving the speed of your computer, I would beg you to make sure you have at least one full backup (either via Time Machine or a cloning utility like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner) onto a new and reliable drive.

Malwarebytes for Mac does work well but in the last few years I feel like it's gotten a little scummy in terms of trying to get users to pay for upgrades/subscriptions. If you are comfortable installing it, running a scan, and then removing it, you can use it for free without much trouble.

KnockKnock is a reputable free tool to scan your system for sneaky and persistent things that could be malware, but it assumes a high level of nerdy competence and expects you to clean things up yourself. If you run KnockKnock and all you see are things you expect (like startup items for Dropbox or your Adobe subscription manager, etc) then it's safe to say malware is not your issue.
posted by bcwinters at 11:50 AM on February 13, 2022 [7 favorites]

I suggest temporarily creating another user account on your computer. Log in as that user and see if the new account performs better. If not, it’s unlikely that you can improve your situation via software. You can try removing log in items and freeing up hard drive space. Your OS needs something like a Gig of free hard drive space to operate.
posted by plasticbugs at 3:01 PM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

I really like Clean My Mac.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:51 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. Yes I have everything double backed up by Carbon Copy Cloner. Im not worried about losing files. Just trying to work in Photoshop for another 6 months or whenever the new imac pro desktop comes about and I can justify buying it. I"ll try one or more of these recommendations.
posted by Liquidwolf at 6:06 PM on February 13, 2022

nthing RAM/SSD, even for 6 months.....

When I ran a mac of similar vintage that turned to treacle, I bit the bullet ported all my stuff to a new M1 macbook. The speed increase was amazing. But almost as amazing wass making a new account, and dragging all of the data into that account, and re-installing all of the programs from scratch. It was like giving the computer a colonic.

I'd run mac 10.5->10.14 for ~12+ years on one account cloned it between machines and, kept on upgrading all the software+OS in it, and it just got JANKY.
posted by lalochezia at 4:43 AM on February 14, 2022

There is very little malware or bloatware for Mac. Not none, but the odds that the slowness is being caused by extra programs are small. The Mac migration assistant is great, but one thing it encourages is upgrading endlessly from version to version to version. It's good to do a clean install every once in a while. I don't mean from your backup, at minimum a new user, preferably a clean OS install. Macs don't get slow due to age per se, that is a common misconception. If you put a fresh OS install on 10-year-old Mac (well, as fresh as can be since they don't support the OS forever), it will be zippy as new.

OP, I don't entirely get your comment about allocating Photoshop plenty of space. Scratch disk capacity is important but RAM is much more so. How much RAM do you have, and how much does Activity Monitor say is in use?
posted by wnissen at 11:19 AM on February 14, 2022