Is parentalcontrolsd eating your memory on your mac?

If you have a Mac, take a minute and run the Activity Monitor

(quickest way for me is to type: Cmd-Space and type 'activity' - good old spotlight)

Do you see a process called 'parentalcontrolsd'? If so, take a look at it:

If it's anything like on my Mac, you may now be saying 'HOWWW much memory?'

2.43Gb virtual? To do what? I don't even have Parental Controls switched on! When I search the web, it seems like no-one else with this problem does either - and there seem to be a lot of people having similar problems.

I'm on El Capitan (10.11.5) but I've had this for a long time. The weird thing is, it's on my 'work' Mac (15" pro retina) but not on my BYOD one that I also use for work and which has much the same software stack (13" pro retina). I've tried pretty much all the internet suggestions and got a whole load of nowhere.

Anyone any ideas?

At the moment, all I can offer is this: Macs have two useful commands for processes. Go to 'terminal' to use them:

pgrep parentalcontrolsd (or even just pgrep parental - it works with partial names)

If you get a number back, then parentalcontrolsd is running.

Then you need:
sudo pkill -9 parentalcontrolsd (you'll get prompted for your password - you need sudo to run this as root)

This kills it stone dead (as you can see in the screenshot). Use pgrep to check.

It's OK to use pkill even if it doesn't find the process - I keep it in a terminal window so I can just use 'up arrow' to run it when I need it. Which I do, because it keeps coming back . . .

More enlightened people will probably be able to create a scheduled job using cron or some such to kill it every hour or so.

**update** I've tried using Automator to run the pkill every hour or so - only problem is that I can't get automator to run a script as root/admin so I get permission errors . .any ideas? **update**

Even more enlightened people probably have a proper cure - if you do, please let me know!

Microsoft Office / Visio not activating even though you have a license?

I use Visio 2010 at work- this is not about the product or the version!

We also have Office 365, but that doesn't include Visio - so I need to order it. The company obtains a license and sends me a link to an automated download/installer.

(For those wondering, yes, I have a Mac. Yes I also have a Windows VMWare image under Fusion)

And to be fair, it validates my internal ID, downloads and installs Visio, with the usual 'please reboot'.

Only problem is, Visio starts up with this:

"Microsoft Visio 2010 cannot verify the license for this product. You should repair the Office Program by using Control Panel."

(I can't screen-shot the dialog box as I now don't get it any more - sorry)

Control Panel offers a 'repair' but that doesn't work. Neither does uninstall/reinstall and plenty of rebooting of windows - thank goodness it's quick under VMWare on the Mac!

Control Panel lets me enter my license key: Nope, can't do that - company 'embeds' it somehow in the download - I don't know what it is.

Anyway, after LOTS of googling and thanks to many people at the Microsoft support forums, this worked for me.

1. Run cmd.exe, but right-click and use 'run as administrator'
2. Navigate to c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14
3. Type 'cscript ospp.vbs /act' (without the single quotes)

Easy and intuitive as I think you'll agree! YMMV - it worked for me . . . .