Should I just try to reset machine to earlier Time Machine settings or what?

Avast Mac Security
1

I used my iMac 2009 running 10.6.8 this morning and things were fine. Eight hours later I turn it on again and there’s the spinning dial at the bottom for a few minutes - weird because I can’t remember the last time this happened, usually it just boots & I’m on my way. The changes I noticed were smaller-than-usual icons on the startup screen (set now at 1920X1200 instead of 1600X1000), and when I started poking around I saw the screen saver in the preferences that I had it set at said “this screen saver can’t be used with this OS, contact vendor for a newer version.”

The latest Time Machine ™ backup was done this morning at 10AM and before that at 9AM which makes sense because I turned the machine off at around 10 and left for the day.

So using TM with my external Western Digital drive, should I reset the startup process to the way it was this morning or is something more serious is going on? If I should reset using TM, how do I do it? Haven’t used TM in years.

Edit: I just tried to run Avast for the heck of it and the error msg said “You are not protected; cannot connect to service”. Hmmmm.

Another prob: I tried to run iTunes 11.4 with songs on my hard drive. I clicked on the arrow to begin playing & nothing played; the 2 bars to pause the song were showing after I tried to play, and the volume indicator which is usually at the top of the screen is missing.

And now the machine is not recognizing a flash drive when inserted.

What the heck is going on?

Thanks, Joe.

2

You can try to startup the mac without any startup items. Hold down shift when booting. If this works then you have a startup item / kernel extension causing your issue.

Also you can run a hardware test using the built in Apple Hardware test, Hold down the “D” key at boot to start the test.

Did you make any changes recently or install any new software? Usually a change like this has some cause

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I wanted to get back to you about this issue. After reading your post I did the hardware test & there were no probs. Then I did a safe boot, holding down the shift key while booting & lo-and-behold the ‘problem’ reappeared. So I booted normally & the machine started as usual. Seems like the machine went into a safe boot originally & I didn’t recognize what was happening but things are OK now. All I can do is shake my head. Thanks for your response Mac, I appreciate it.