mac - Macbook All ram being used with no apps open

07
2014-07
  • addison

    I recently was teaching this kid to program, and he wanted to teach me some things in screen flow, so he showed me where to get it, and I got part way through the installer, and then I quit it because it looked really fake. And ever since then, the ram on my Mac has been getting drained extremely fast and I can't barely use it. I'm assuming this is a virus, but I can't be sure. I downloaded the avast! app and I couldn't even finish the installation before my computer said I had no ram left. All I had was the installer open, and I have 8GB of ram installed. I had to shut it down, and I restarted it and got it installed, but after like 3 minutes of scanning, it just gets really slow and now I can't ever stop the scan, and it's not scaning anymore files. I had to ask this question on my phone because my computer is too slow. I also replaced my old 4GB ram with 8GB that I got from crucial about 2 weeks ago, so it's possible it could be defective, but it worked fine until now. I'd really appreciate any help or advice on what to do.

    Edit

    I am on a Mid 2010 13in MacBook Pro, with OS X 10.8 installed and 8GB of ram that I bought, if that matters

    • Answers
  • Dipak Patel

    Try following the steps here to reinstall your OS: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

    This should keep your data in place, but ultimately you may need to backup what you can and do a complete erase and install of the system.


    • Related Question

    What percentage of all viruses are detected by anti-virus software?
  • VecVanDoom

    I suppose that there are every day new viruses detected, that it is hard for the software companies to keep up. As a consequence there has to be a significant amount of any kind of malware, to which I simply refer to as viruses, to stay undetectable for a while. Will someone ruffly estimate or give numbers of the amount of those being undetected, at any given time? Since virus programmers have potentially more time and enthusiasm then their counterparts, who work for money, but may have more sophisticated methods it might come a nonlinear developement.

    edit: you can leave the viruses that never get discovered out of scope. i just wonder how unprotected you are even with good antivirus software.


    • Related Answers
  • Satanicpuppy

    It's not 100%, which is really the only metric that matters. Some things are going to get by. Your best bet is to use multiple types of protection (not multiple anti-virus programs, but anti-virus programs, file integrity scanners, malware scanners, etc) and to do your virus-happy stuff on a machine that you can wipe without much trouble.

  • crazysim

    I can tell you that today's malware are much more stealthy. Honestly, I'm not sure what kind of reasonable experiment or research could answer your question.

    There is this though: http://www.virustotal.com/estadisticas.html .

  • Rich Homolka

    I can't give a number, but you do realize this is an impossible question to answer, just guess at.

    If you can't detect it, it's probably because you don't know about it at all. So you're trying to guess at an unknown quantity. We've gone from the 'hey, let me show how cool i am by having a virus that makes a lot of noise when you're infected' to 'lets stay under the radar so we can exploit this computer for money for a long time'.