CLOSE ME PLEASE QUESTION ANSWERED

LoveIsUnity

I have a friend who called and said the Mac laptop she purchased last year was running slowly, so slowly in fact there was a delay when she was typing an e-mail in Firefox. I am hoping to troubleshoot it, but with a Mac I'm not even sure where to start. Are there programs like Malwarebytes for Mac? Do Macs have issues with viruses and malware? If anyone could point me in the right direction that would be awesome.

Echo

Start with the Activity Monitor to see if there's something gobbling up CPU/disk drive.

admanb

It's also worth doing a real quick check to make sure she hasn't filled up her hard disk.

tynic

Also, go to Disk Utility (under Applications/Utilities) and run a quick permissions repair.

If it's only a year old it shouldn't be a hardware issue, but you could also do a disk verification just to make sure. The most likely culprit is a kernel panic or something chewing up the CPU, like Echo said.

NightDragon

I'm not sure how computer-savvy this person is, but I've seen a lot of people who haven't used Macs before do things like "open up 20 programs and not realize all 20 programs are still running". Do they know that the dock will have very tiny little triangles under the icons to show which applications are running?

This seems like one of those obvious "is it plugged in?" kinds of questions, but if it's that simple to fix, that would be great for them.

LoveIsUnity

You all are awesome.

Creagan

Have they shut the computer off recently? My roommate thought her Mac was breaking until somebody finally got her to restart the thing. Then it was fine.

bowen

Creagan wrote: »

Have they shut the computer off recently? My roommate thought her Mac was breaking until somebody finally got her to restart the thing. Then it was fine.

Yeah that would definitely go hand in hand with Nightdragon's comment. If she just closes the lid and doesn't actually restart or update the laptop there's a good chance all those programs are just chilling out in memory and just need ⌘ + q on all those programs.

LoveIsUnity

Yeah, that's actually what was going on. I checked it out last night and saw that Firefox was eating up a ton of resources, which shouldn't be happening with 8 gigs of Ram and a better CPU than I have in my gaming rig, heh. I updated some software and it's all good now.

Thanks for all of the responses. This can be closed.