Hard to admit but I don’t really have any photos to show that we’ve been busy.  We just haven’t done much outdoors or momentous enough to photograph. The primary reason for not getting out is we’ve just finished our 16-day Carac skin treatment that keeps us out of the sun during the process and for the next 14 days for the most part.

So it’s indoor chores and thankfully quite a number of tech support calls and house calls. Seems a number of Macs have gotten some kind of Malware or Adware bug installed in their systems.  I’ve never felt the need to run or have any virus protection on my Mac but today I’ve installed Avast, free highly-rated virus detection software for the OS X systems. Avast Mac Download.  Before I tried Avast I followed an Apple Support bulletin that gave me the files to delete in the first reported case.  I later ran Avast and found still more files in the Firefox realm.

The symptoms in the first encounter reported was Ads popping up stating that you have a virus and to call an 800 number.  This machine also had pop-ups with various ads that would not go away or allow you to close the browser in both Safari and Firefox.  Searching the Web produced more problems than solutions, as many of the sites and forums actually recommend loading apps like MacKeeper, that contain similar Malware.  The only one that seems legit at this time is AdWare Medic AdWareMedic link which I’m testing as I type.

Avast takes a long time to run if you have a large amount of data stored on the hard drive. After 45 minutes and 7% of the HD scanned it found 14 “infections”.  AdwareMedic produced a list of 16 files to remove in only several minutes and has a button to “Remove Selected Adware”.

I have to shut down the browsers to enable the Remove process for AdwareMedic, which I’ll do shortly.  Avast is 60 minutes in and still only 14 “infections detected” but 9 files it was unable to scan and 58% of the HD scanned.  I’ll report back on the outcome.

Oh, we did get in a couple of day hikes, Stanna warped the loom, and the garage got a short “sorting.”  Does planning count as worthy of mentioning?  We’ve traced our last two Swiss hikes (dark green lines) and have a number of ideas for this September (post-its). We do enjoy getting your emails and “reports” so keep us posted.

Update: Steve Eliot comfirmed AdWareMedic’s recommendation

. . .  about a month ago, I was having  a lot of trouble with my iMac . . .  screen freezes weird things that I never saw before that would lock up my screen so that I couldn’t  do anything.   I finally used Apple Care.  They reported about the same problems that you were talking about on your blog.  They also told me about AdwareMedic  they said they run Adware the first thing in the morning before they do any thing else.

I immediately installed it on my Mac and so far I have only caught one bad item.   So I guess my machine is pretty clean.  I have also not had any of the recurring problems that I had a month ago.

Thanks Steve, for the feedback