If you’ve ever gone to Apple’s support forums and asked for help with a problem (or any support forum, for that matter), chances are a savvy guru will tell you they need some basic configuration details for your Mac. There is a great (and free) tool that will help you gather that information quickly, and it’s called EtreCheck.
After installing into your application folder, running EtreCheck will scan your system and full information from settings files and scan important system folders for things like Kernel Extensions, User Launch Agents, Internet Plug-Ins and 3rd Party Preference Panes. Here’s what you see on launch:
On completion, you’ll see a window with a scrollable collection of this data, like this:
From here you can copy the report to the clipboard and paste into a forum window or a rich document with even the free TextEdit app provided with Mac OS X). A detailed overview of the sections is available at this About EtreCheck page.
The nature of each section, typical problems and corresponding solutions would be too much to cover in a single blog post. For that matter, you’ll find dozens (hundreds?) of posts about topics like iMac freezes on Apple’s own support site, so this isn’t a problem solver. However, the first step to getting (free) help from people in the know is often providing them all of the details about your system in one post so they don’t have to ask you for these facts interactively.
As always, it’s a great idea to know your closest Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP). I want to give a shout out to a favorite near my hometown, maccentric. They have provided service for my Macs, both in-warranty and out-of-warranty, and I have always been satisfied to say the least.
If you have a favorite non-Apple AASP, please share the name and URL in the comments below!
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