I’m functionally literate on Mac and a virtual dunderhead on PC. So 2 questions:
1.)My Mac (my main computer) seems slower and has crashed a few times lately. An odd message repeats and scrolls up the screen (from the bottom to the top) and I have to power off and restart. Then, everything’s fine. Am I inaffected; and if so, what is a good anti-virus program for mac. The machine is an iBook G4, about 1.5 years old.
2.) Just bought my wife a PC for work. She’s a science geek at a university and the hospital labs don’t support Mac. We got her a mid-level HP laptop. We’ve had it about a week. Problem is, it keeps closing applications with a message saying something like, “To protect your computer, Windows is closing this application.” It’s obviously some kind of safety feature run amuck. How do you turn this thing off, or make it less sensitive. It’s really beginning to piss her off.
What is the exact message - does it tell you to reboot in several languages? If so, this is a “kernel panic” and is 99% hardware related. Have you added extra ram or an airport card lately? what version of the OS are you running?
On the topic of mac viruses - they do not exist. There are some that can get into office documents (mainly word) and cause a little havoc but that’s about it (called macro viruses) there are fixes for those without anti-virus software.
My advice is to totally stay away from any anti-virus software on a mac. I’ve been working on the technical side of macs for 8 years and all the anti-virus stuff is a pain and certainly not worth it.
No new hardware. The machine is totally stock. I don’t have the the text of the message cuz I’ve never bothered to write it down when it happens. I’ll do that next time.
I’m running version 10.3.6.
When I open a few applications (ie Safari), instead of opening immediately, it takes a bit of time and the little swirling pointer thing spins for a few seconds before the program opens.
The message is pretty much what i wrote, but not exactly word for word. I’ll get the exact message next time it happens (which should be in a few minutes, it happens so often).
Do you have your computer set to automatically do software updates? Something might have updated and is causing the problems now. Its either that or possibly a failing RAM card…
if it is a virus (yes there are MAC viruses just a lot fewer since they have a smaller market share and less hatred) I like this scanner it is based on a free open source scanner I’ve used on other machines (ClamXav 1.0.1).