Creating a System Report With EtreCheck

If you are getting online help from a source you trust, you can help them by providing a system report generated from the third-party app EtreCheck. This report includes many details about your hardware and software that can help someone help you.



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Closed captioning for this video is available on YouTube: Creating a System Report With EtreCheck.
So if you ever have trouble with your Mac your best option is always to get it to an expert for a first hand look. You can take it to the Genius Bar. You can take it to a shop. You can take it to a friend that knows lots about Macs or a user group. But it's not always possible. Sometimes you want to at least try to get help online. When you do that usually the other person, the person that's trying to help you out, needs to know details about your Mac. One way to give that to them is to create a report using software called EtreCheck.

I've done a search for it here. It's in the Mac App Store. It's one of two ways that you can get it. You can search for it in the Mac App Store and here you can download it and it's free. Another way you can get it is by going to EtreCheck.com and download it from there. Either way the results are pretty much going to be the same. I think most users will be most comfortable downloading it from the Mac App Store.

So once it's downloaded you can open it here. You can go to Launchpad and open it. Any way you would normally run an app. It's going to, right away, ask you to create a report which is what you're trying to do. So you're going to choose a problem here. It helps if you choose a problem similar to what is going on. But if you choose other problem or no problem it's going to generate mostly the same information. I'm going to choose No Problem and I'm going to hit Start. It's going to start creating this report.

So the idea here is to create a list of everything going on on your Mac. If you were to go for online support and give somebody basic information, oh I've got an iMac and I'm having this trouble, then they may come back to you and say, well what version of Mac OS are you running or what version of this app are you running. What hardware do you have, and how much memory. You know you can go back and forth for awhile trying to figure out what the problem is. A lot of that stuff is really basic information. So if they have a report like this instead of having to ask you how much storage space you have available or something like that they can just look at this report and know that. So they can get to the problem quicker.

A lot of online communities, particularly the Apple Forums, the discussion groups at Apple, they ask people there to submit or post the EtreCheck reports so that somebody can quickly diagnose what the problem may be.

So once you're done you get this report generated. It gives you some information to start with. You can browse through some of the stuff in the report like major issues, minor issues. But if you don't know what the things here mean chances are this isn't going to help you very much. Typically what you're looking for is the Share Report button. You can copy it as text so you can paste it into an email or a chat or something like that. You can choose Mail and email it to somebody and this is probably the best way tone able to get the report to someone.

If you want to view the full report yourself go all the way to the bottom of the list on the left here and you can see the complete report. It's a ton of information so probably not useful to most people but the report will be very useful to an expert trying to give you online help.

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