Though it's not easy to hack into or break through a Mac's security, it is possible, especially if someone accidentally installs malware without realizing it. If your Mac is running slow or you're seeing unusual advertisements within your web browser you might have accidentally installed malware at some point. It happens to the best of us (not me, of course). There are things you can do without having to burn it all down. • • The problem: Mac malware in the Library folder My father-in-law's MacBook Pro had been running into curious slowdowns for a two-year-old laptop and he kept on seeing weird sites taking over his Safari and Firefox search bars. It was clear to me that his browser had been hijacked. We got rid of the browser hijack pretty quickly — I suggest using — but the slowdowns were more curious. Upon further investigation, I found a couple of self-professed 'Mac security programs' that popped up, demanding money to 'clean your Mac from junk'. Spoiler: These programs were the junk. And worst of all, they'd seemingly added a bunch of nonsense files into this computer's Library folder, with random folder names like 'prestidigitation' and 'beeswax'. Now, I want to preface: I'd never seen an attack like this on a Mac before in my life, and finding this kind of full-Mac hijack is very rare. It's likely that he accidentally installed one of these 'security' programs (or had it installed), which spiraled out of control from there. These hijacks didn't appear to be able to do much beyond slow down his machine with endless failed attempts to run a program — the process didn't have admin permissions, so it couldn't execute a thing from the library. Adobe reader for mac why are the page need to be fleped after printing free. But because they were there, they were constantly crashing aspects of his Mac. How to fix a corrupted Mac I knew I had a malfunctioning laptop on my hands, so I turned to my age-old troubleshooting checklist. If you're working on a computer that has slowed down beyond reasonable aging or is otherwise acting beyond the pale, here are my favorite tactics you can take to try and restore it to its former glory. Update the system software This is almost always the first thing I do when troubleshooting Macs: Chances are, the user hasn't installed a security update or other software updates that may be slowing their computer to a crawl. • Click on the Apple menu icon in the upper left corner of the screen. • Select App Store to open the Mac App Store. • Click on the Updates tab at the top of the Mac App Store window. • Install all relevant updates. (You may need the Apple ID and password for the machine.) If the computer is running macOS Sierra, you can avoid having to do this troubleshooting step in the future by turning on Automatic Install in System Preferences, which can automatically download newly available updates in the background, and install them overnight. • With the Mac App Store open, click on App Store in the upper left corner of the Menu bar. • Click on Preferences. • Under Automatically check for updates, check the following boxes: • Download newly available updates in the background • Install app updates • Install macOS updates • Install system data files and security updates Check the disk for errors If software updates aren't doing the trick, the next thing to check is the hard drive itself. With Apple's Internet Recovery partition, fixing a cranky drive is an easy process. • During reboot, hold down Command-R until it starts up. • Once rebooted, you should be in the Internet Recovery Partition. Select Disk Utility. Free games download for mac full version. • Click Continue. • In Disk Utility, click on the First Aid button, • Click on Run to execute. Your Mac will then run a cursory check on its hard drive to determine if there's anything wrong, and if so, if it can fix it. Reset the NVRAM/PRAM and SMC If neither app updates nor disk repair are helping, sometimes a good cache flush can get your Mac running just a bit more smoothly. To reset the NVRAM (or, on older Macs, PRAM), reboot the Mac and hold down the following keyboard command during startup for at least twenty seconds: Command-Option-P-R.
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