Day: February 16, 2021

Several months ago I did my usual software update of MacOS.

Everything went perfectly… or so I thought.

Then about 4 weeks ago, my computer started acting odd. At first, it was just a minor issue here or there and all were easily resolved.

Then suddenly, my computer would go to sleep and I couldn’t wake it with the bluetooth keyboard. Annoying! After a day or two, my computer wouldn’t wake from sleep pressing a key on the built in keyboard. I had to press the power button. SUPER ANNOYING!

Then I noticed the backups that were supposed to be happening hourly, were sometimes happening 15 minutes apart and other times many hours apart. Strange!

Then my computer stopped unlocking with my Apple Watch. When I went to the control panel to find out why, it turned out that the option to even turn that on or off had completely disappeared.

After fiddling with things for a while, I called Apple. Nothing made sense and the system was behaving more and more badly as each day passed. Two weeks of trying the things that Apple Engineering suggested and sending them logs (sometimes multiple logs) per day and still no progress.

Yesterday, Apple and I finally decided to do the ultimate fix.

I wiped the hard drive and began again. I’ve managed to get most of the software back on the system and working again. There are a few bits that can only be described as, “The child ain’t right,” but it appears that I have a system that’s stable and working correctly now.

Why didn’t I use my TimeMachine backups? Because I didn’t trust them!

After reinstalling the operating system, and while I was moving my documents back onto the machine. It occurred to me that this computer had been restored from my MacBook Air backup in 2019. That system had been in continuous use through 9 versions of the MacOS.

God knows what leftovers were on that machine!

I noticed while I was poking around trying to fix whatever problem this MacBook Pro had, that there were preferences and bits of software that hadn’t been touched since 2012. I dunno, I somehow thought Apple did a better job of cleaning up.

On the other hand, there had been 9 operating systems on the Air and I’d never had to reformat the drive in all that time. DO THAT WITH A WINDOWS MACHINE!

My machine is once again “happy” and I’m getting there myself, even though I’ve been in digital hell for the past 36 hours.

It’s coming together, but you never realize how much crap you’ve got until something like this happens. Once I’m finished, I’ll probably wipe one of the backups and start fresh.

For the time being, I’m running backups OFF. Until I get the last bits of software working properly. VMware as usual, is being a pain, (Actually VMware is fine, Windows is being snotty,) Another application that I downloaded from the Apple App Store, doesn’t want to reinstall its license so it’s not fully operational yet.

I think that may be a delete and reinstall situation. I’ve had to do that before with this particular application.

If you’re having weird problems after upgrading to Big Sur, you might want to go nuke on the system. Since I’ve done that, I’ve noticed a lot of little things that are working. These are little things that you don’t notice until they show up correctly, and you say, “Oh, that’s what they meant…”

Anyway, back to it…