2017 iMac 27 inch Etrecheck Report

The good news is we finally got your EtreCheck report! The bad news is you have some very destructive apps installed!

First a little education, Mac OS does not need ANY of the following types of apps to remain secure and fast:

• Antivirus
• cleaning
• Security
• VPN
• Maintenance

These types of apps have the exact opposite effects users want. They make Mac OS slow, appear buggy, create odd behaviors and do NOTHING beneficial in return!

Your Mac has both Intego AV and Clean My Mac installed, both are horrible pieces of software and like the cause of you computers problems.

Please research the developers uninstall instructions for both and follow to the letter. Then restart the computer in Safe Mode, restart normally and post a fresh EtreCheck report so we can tell if both are totally gone.

All that Mac OS needs to remain fast and VERY secure is to simply keep it up to date and restart the computer about 1x per week.

You didn't post the report correctly. Try the following:

Copy the report as shown in this animated screenshot

and use the Additional Text button to paste the report in your reply.

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine the cause of the problem.

Yeah; a 16 GB Fusion i5 iMac is never going to have great performance. (There are workarounds, including booting from an SSD.)

The add-ons here (the anti-malware and the cleaner) are from classes of apps that can sometimes cause trouble, including crashes and corruptions. I’d remove those before migrating.

File system performance looks good for this hardware. It’ll sprint, but will fade to the (low) speed of the HDD under any sustained read or write load.

First, there is no reason to ever install or run any 3rd party "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus, VPN or security apps on your Mac.  This documents describe what you need to know and do in order to protect your Mac: Effective defenses against malware and other threats - Apple Community and Recognize and avoid phishing messages, phony support calls, and other scams - Apple Support.  

There are no known viruses, i.e. self propagating, for Macs.  There are, however, adware and malware which require the user to install although unwittingly most of the time thru sneaky links, etc.   

Anti Virus developers try to group all types as viruses into their ad campaigns of fear.  They do a poor job of the detecting and isolating the adware and malware.  Since there are no viruses these apps use up a lot of system resources searching for what is non-existent and adversely affect system and app performance.

There is one app, Malwarebytes, which was developed by a long time contributor to these forums and a highly respected member of the computer security community, that is designed solely to seek out adware and known malware and remove it.  The free version is more than adequate for most users.  

Unless you're using a true VPN tunnel, such as between you and your employer's, school's or bank's servers, they provide false security from a privacy standpoint. 

You have two apps installed, CleanMyMac and Intego, which are not needed and one, CMM, is considered akin to malware by most here in the forums.

Uninstall both according to the developers' instructions. When done you can check to see if you've removed all of the supporting files by downloading and running the shareware app Find Any File to search for any files with the application's or the developer's name in the file name.  For the software mentioned you'd do the following search(es): 

1 - Name contains cleanmymac

2 - Name contains macpaw

3 - Names contains into

Any files that are found can be dragged from the search results window to the Desktop or Trash bin in the Dock for deletion.

FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages.  

If you get warnings that the file can't be deleted because it is in use or used by another app boot into Safe Mode according to How to use safe mode on your Mac and delete from there.

Note:  if you have a wireless keyboard with rechargeable batteries connect it with its charging cable before booting into Safe Mode.  This makes it act as a wired keyboard as will assure a successful boot into Safe Mode.

What you need to do to get completely rid of CMM and Intego is to download FindAnyFile and have it search for and get rid of anything with the following names in it:

• Intego
• Clean My Mac
• MacPaw

This will remove all of the files that have those name in them. Then restart in Safe Mode again and run another (#3) EtreCheck report and check to see that all of Intego and CMM are 100% gone. If they are still present then the last thing you can do is to do an erase and install meaning you have to start over as if its a new machine.

Again: copy the report as shown in this animated screenshot

and use the Additional Text button to paste the report in your reply.

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine the cause of the problem.

Migrate your data to the new Mac.

It’ll probably work. Migrations are usually successful.

Migrations do not alter the contents of the source (old) Mac.

Worst case, the migration somehow fails, and you can reset and start over on the new Mac.

What might be happening on the old iMac? Whether the problem will propagate? Donno. That’s what the report contains.

I also noticed the install date of CMM is pretty recent, something I am guessing you installed hoping it would clean your system and make it faster. Well you should not have done that, all it did was make matters worse.

Also, these types of apps have a habit of damaging Mac OS, hopefully that has not happened yet. If it has you will need to install Mac OS which is not difficult, just ensure all you data is backed up and your backup works!!!!!!