Nothing heavy here, just a little reflection of a recent incident with my 2018 MacBook Pro + Monterey.
It was one of those situations that we all dread; waking your Mac of a morning and find that nothing is quite the same.
The cursor is pin-wheeling. Where it isn't pin-wheeling, I click on apps from the dock and they just bounce... endlessly... Nothing is connecting to the internet (In fact, the Mac doesn't even recognise a wi-fi module or any connectivity). Console log reports kernel panics throughout the night. Activity Monitor shows that Adobe Creative Cloud is, basically, going into Chernobyl mode at near 300% CPU. The App Store wants to update but can't. The fans are going crazy and my prized possession is about to melt.
In effect, I'm screwed.
Restarting doesn't solve the problem, and sleeping/waking the MacBoom causes it to kernel panic.
What makes this amusing is that I was hasten to purchase an external HDD for a Time Machine, because I'm so stingy that I've been waiting for it to go back down £5 on Amazon again.
It's been years since I've had to perform any surgery on a Mac, so I looked at my options. Luckily Finder was one of the few remaining things that worked, so I could copy any non-cloud documents to a small external drive. I gave Recovery Mode a go for the first time and tried First Aid.
But before I went to the extent of reinstalling the OS, which I really really didn't want to do, I gave Safe Boot a try. Never done this before, in fact I only really associated it with Windows and didn't know it existed on Mac until a quick Google search on my iPhone.
Yes, I probably sound like a complete idiot for being impressed by a (basic) boot mode, but it's given me a whole new perspective for problem solving. Everything worked as it should and Safari even brought up a page detailing what it can offer. It clears caches and the alike, and disables startup items/non-essential software to help troubleshoot problems.
So one-by-one I went through many of the apps that failed to work from a normal boot, and eventually came to what was likely the culprit...
Adobe CC ?♂️
Is anyone really surprised?
I can't pin down the exact cause of the problem, but after opening the main CC window, it said that all my apps needed updating. After clicking on update all it whizzed through all but one in a few seconds, which suggests that the updating process was somehow interfering with the wifi and CPU time during a normal boot.
I restarted in normal boot and everything is great - faster than normal, I would even say.
So there you have it... I'm not suggesting this is going to solve everyones problems, but I totally endorse it as a first line of troubleshooting.
What have I learned? Safe Boot is a simple but excellent tool; I can afford the extra £5 for a HDD; and Adobe CC is a pile of...
It was one of those situations that we all dread; waking your Mac of a morning and find that nothing is quite the same.
The cursor is pin-wheeling. Where it isn't pin-wheeling, I click on apps from the dock and they just bounce... endlessly... Nothing is connecting to the internet (In fact, the Mac doesn't even recognise a wi-fi module or any connectivity). Console log reports kernel panics throughout the night. Activity Monitor shows that Adobe Creative Cloud is, basically, going into Chernobyl mode at near 300% CPU. The App Store wants to update but can't. The fans are going crazy and my prized possession is about to melt.
In effect, I'm screwed.
Restarting doesn't solve the problem, and sleeping/waking the MacBoom causes it to kernel panic.
What makes this amusing is that I was hasten to purchase an external HDD for a Time Machine, because I'm so stingy that I've been waiting for it to go back down £5 on Amazon again.
It's been years since I've had to perform any surgery on a Mac, so I looked at my options. Luckily Finder was one of the few remaining things that worked, so I could copy any non-cloud documents to a small external drive. I gave Recovery Mode a go for the first time and tried First Aid.
But before I went to the extent of reinstalling the OS, which I really really didn't want to do, I gave Safe Boot a try. Never done this before, in fact I only really associated it with Windows and didn't know it existed on Mac until a quick Google search on my iPhone.
Yes, I probably sound like a complete idiot for being impressed by a (basic) boot mode, but it's given me a whole new perspective for problem solving. Everything worked as it should and Safari even brought up a page detailing what it can offer. It clears caches and the alike, and disables startup items/non-essential software to help troubleshoot problems.
So one-by-one I went through many of the apps that failed to work from a normal boot, and eventually came to what was likely the culprit...
Adobe CC ?♂️
Is anyone really surprised?
I can't pin down the exact cause of the problem, but after opening the main CC window, it said that all my apps needed updating. After clicking on update all it whizzed through all but one in a few seconds, which suggests that the updating process was somehow interfering with the wifi and CPU time during a normal boot.
I restarted in normal boot and everything is great - faster than normal, I would even say.
So there you have it... I'm not suggesting this is going to solve everyones problems, but I totally endorse it as a first line of troubleshooting.
What have I learned? Safe Boot is a simple but excellent tool; I can afford the extra £5 for a HDD; and Adobe CC is a pile of...