Later that night (as well as today); Etre check shows laptop as excellent.
But that night ( and other nights -- usually night) it will say poor.
What does Etrecheck say is Poor or Excellent? Am I correct in assuming that is in specific reference to System Performance?
Someone else suggested that the launch stuff I'm thinking (because it's in red), is really innocuous,…
If Etrecheck flags something in
Red there is a reason usually based on a lot of experience by a lot of people. It is definitely worth working on that issue. (With the advent of Etrecheck to prod me, I periodically go through and prune the Launch Agents, Launch Daemons, and Startup Items. It is surprising how prolific those things can be.) However that may, or may not, be related to your performance problem.
...and real issue is the activity monitor which says, Kernal at 180% and 300 %.
They may be correct. But why doesn't the monitor say what is causing Kernal to be at that?
It is normal for the kernel task to be among the top processes using the CPU. Some really heavy duty processing task such as one of the Adobe apps or Final Cut, Logic Pro, Compressor,
etc. can easily top it however. But it does seem unusual for kernel to get as high as you are seeing. Activity Monitor can only "see" usage at the task level, and kernel is a monolithic task. For kernel to eat that much CPU time it has to be performing some system chore such as combining Time Machine backups, rebuilding the Spotlight indexes, File vaulting a drive,
etc.. A look at Disk I/O might yield some clues.
On launch services, I did a terminal thing and ONYX rebuild launch services, did not help-- everything same, red marks..
Launch Services is a database that keeps track of what apps belong to which file extension, file type and even in some cases individual files. It is a one time task and the only impact it is likely to have on performance is failure to recognize the appropriate app to use to open a file. Rebuilding the Launch Service database won't hurt anything but it wouldn't solve your problem.
(btw you have Etra Pro? I guess unlike free, it actually is better and fixing what it identifies with free version?)
Etrecheck Pro has, IMHO, better more understandable reports, and makes a reasonable attempt at providing some troubleshooting help beyond, "post this report on Apple's forum and see what advice you get". I believe in the biblical adage
the worker is worthy of his hire and if I find an app that is useful enough to use regularly, I have no problem paying for it — and otherwise I delete it rather than having it take up storage space on my drive. It is an added benefit and incentive when, like Etrecheck, the "Pro" version offers additional features. I also use the paid version of Malwarebytes and like Etrecheck Pro it too offers useful functionality not available in the free version.
