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MacBook Air Freezing during sleep - Apple Support suggest removing Sophos product

SalishSwede
Problem Frequency: Daily Problem Description: Computer will not wake after sleeping. Attempted Resolution steps: 1. Calling Apple tech support 2. Holding Power button for 3 seconds. 3. Holding Command-Option-ESC for long periods 4. Forced hard shut down: holding power button for prolonged periods. <-- loss of data but it does reboot The tech support analyst told me the following: 1. There are no viruses for the Mac. He said this on May 1, 2012 with extensive media reports of Mac-based bot-net viruses based on a very old unresolved ublished security issue. 2. Having explained that I have an anti-virus program (sophos), he told me that I should remove this software. The quality of support on this incident is absurdly poor. Does anyone out there have any RATIONAL approach to dealing with this problem? Thanks
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    Well, I may be able to help with SOME of that...

    Technically, there are no "in the wild" computer viruses that affect current versions of OS X.  That's a lot of hair splitting, as a computer virus is a very specific type of computer malware that attaches itself to other benign software running on your computer -- just like biological viruses attach themselves to the host system.  However, just like many "viruses" in the biological world are nothing of the sort (many illnesses are bacterial), most computer malware these days is either a trojan (one piece of software with something nasty hidden inside it), a worm (independent software that exploits security weaknesses to work its way through the systems it attacks) or out-and-out fake software that isn't what it claims to be.

    The Flashback "virus" you are referring to is part worm, part trojan, and part fake software -- but there is no virus component.

    Doesn't that make you feel safer?

    Anyway, try turning off On-Access scanning from the preferences, and see if this fixes your problem.  If it does, the issue is a conflict between Sophos Anti-Virus and your current configuration of OS X.  If the issue doesn't go away, the problem is elsewhere.  If it DOES go away, then there's a conflict between the real-time scanner and something else on your computer.  Do you use Time Machine?  Putting a computer to sleep while Time Machine is running can sometimes cause problems, and these problems can sometimes be made more likely to occur if SAV is also installed.  If you do have a backup in process when sleeping, and the Mac reliably freezes but only when backups are going and SAV on-access is enabled, add your Time Machine backup disk to the On-Access exclusion list in the Sophos Preferences window.  The downside is that you will no longer be scanning your backups -- the upside is that backups will be marginally faster, your computer will be slightly more stable, and you will not have to deal with alerts regarding detected items in your backup archive... until you attempt to restore them (at which point Sophos Anti-Virus will block the restore process).

    For more assistance, we will need:

    Mac Model

    Operating System version

    Sophos Anti-Virus version

    List of ofther software you've installed that required administrator access (username and password) to install.

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