I have been called to support a user in Eastchester NY whose MAC 2017 laptop had several issues. Customer could not operate the computer at all:

• She could not open Chrome
• There were several nasty popup windows coming up
• The 250 GB hard drive was full
• The Desktop was full of individual pictures that I could not see nor install anything at all

After having retrieved the laptop, I performed the following:

1- I have moved all the pictures located in the desktop to a single folder to make room in the desktop;

2- I have backed them up to a 64 GB USB Flash drive that I gave then to customer at the end of services;

3- I have emptied the recycle bin to gain extra space in the hard drive;

4- I have scanned for viruses with Malware Bytes and fortunately no viruses were found;

5- I then went to the storage manager and looked at the screenshot related to the space taken by the files and the applications such as in the following image:

6- In the recommendations I have deleted the applications that she did not need and I realized also that a huge chunk of the space was taken by the download folder which still contained old 2018 installers of Microsoft Office and other.dmg executables that had been already installed years ago.

7- I updated the operating system: the laptop runs 10.15 which is perfectly fine for a 2017 machine and I highly recommend not to upgrade to more recent OSX released by Apple.

8- Given that the client pays apple Icloud for 2TB of family storage, I gained 10 GB of extra space in her hard drive, by clicking on “Store on Icloud”. As a matter of fact, more pictures and files were moved to the cloud freeing space on her hard disk.

9- Chrome was acting up and in my experience, besides the fact that it slows down the machine, it should not be used in any mac devices. However, as customer uses it as a default browser, I was able to reset it to the factory settings and to apply more security by changing the DNS.

10- I also noticed that Chrome was installed as an image on her machine, which is awkward because every time she was opening it up, the laptop was asking for verifications. I have ejected the image and set it up to run as application instead.

After having rebooted several times because of the cleaning process and the update of the OSX, the laptop became slightly faster and more responsive. I consulted with client to let me know that, next time she needs a new laptop, I will send her advice on a computer with more storage.