My computer takes too long to load each page

[What-The-F-Man]

And every several seconds that spinning ball comes up and doesn't allow me to do anything, does anyone know what the problem might be? (Its a mac)

[Milvus]

What programme are you using?

[What-The-F-Man]

Programme? Im sorry but I'm not computer literate so you will have to talk to me in laymans terms .

[Davethedog]

Do you use Norton?

[Milvus]

I'm assuming that you are browsing on the internet and when you request a new page it takes too long to load. If that is so then you are likely to be running Safari or Firefox browsers. I would expect Safari

[Milvus]

There's no value in running Norton on a mac Dave

[What-The-F-Man]

firefox at the mo, but I've used firefox in the past and this has never happened before.

[What-The-F-Man]

No I don't use norton, actually Im not sure what protection I've got on this.

[Milvus]

Have you tried Clearing Recent History.
Go to Tools in the Top menu bar and click. At the bottom is Clear Recent History. Click
In the window that appears check the boxes beginning Browsing, Form, Cookies and Cache. Leave the last two unchecked. At the top of he window Time Range to clear should be set to Everything. Click Clear Now. When it is complete quit Firefox and restart See what effect that has on speed. If no change come back.

[What-The-F-Man]

Cheers milvus I'll give that a whirl and get back to you.

[Davethedog]

Missed the Mac :-)

[jake-the-peg]

You get malware for Mac too dave

http://www.symantec.c...n/macintosh/antivirus

[What-The-F-Man]

Thanks that has worked milvus though now with the history wiped I now have to manually type every website in from scratch, but at least the speeds back. Why did this happen?

[What-The-F-Man]

Is there any free virus/malware protection or are they rubbish?

[Milvus]

Good stuff. Not sure why it happens but it does occasionally. We took a broad hit at clearing this time. Next time it happens try clicking the Cache box on its own, if that works then you shouldn't have to retype your history. If it doesn't work then click the rest as above and retry.
Another speed up for browsing is to stop Flash loading automatically. The last couple of release of Flash on the Mac have been worse than usual and have stated causing lots of browser crashes. This can be stopped by loading Flashblock on Firefox and ClicktoFlash on Safari. These stop the autoload but give you an option to click the box where flash would have loaded to run the flash movie etc. this really speeds up page loads.
For virus malware protection, I mentioned not using Norton earlier. This is because it gets in the way on a mac and is really hard to remove. Symantec is Ok, I use Intego. A good free version is ClamXAV. There are still no viruses that attack mac OSX systems, but there have been a couple of cases of Trojans being released in pirated Apple software, so worth using a checker in the backgrould

[jake-the-peg]

Milvus - I work for a large Anti-virus/Security company and I can assure you that there are Mac viruses.

There aren't a lot of them OSX.Macarena is one particular example.

and here is a list of some others

http://macscan.securemac.com/spyware-list/

and here

http://ryanlrussell.b.../10/os-x-malware.html

and I think you'll find that Symantec publishes Norton

[Milvus]

Yes absolutely right about Norton. My mistake. Norton though doesn't work well on Mac.
Re your list there are a number of malware exploits as you say. BUT there are no viruses on OSX that have been caught in the wild. There are only two trojans that have been exploited in the wild in the last few years. I'm not aware of any keyloggers that are active at present or of any other malware exploits that are live at present. But you should stay aware which is why I suggested a couple of providers