Appendix B. Appendix B Troubleshooting
Whether it’s a car engine or an operating system, anything with several thousand parts can develop the occasional technical hiccup. MacOS is far more resilient than its predecessors, but it’s still a complex system with the potential for occasional glitches.
Most freaky little issues go away if you just try these two steps, one at a time:
Quit and restart the wayward program.
Log out and log back in again.
It’s the other problems that’ll drive you batty.
Slowdowns and Fans
The biggest complaint you’re likely to have about macOS Catalina comes right after you install it. Suddenly, the Mac slows to a crawl—and its fans are going so hard, it’s alarmingly loud.
It’s a feature, not a bug. And it will go away in about a day.
When you upgrade to Catalina, the Mac may reindex your drive so Spotlight and Siri can use it to find your files. Indexing a drive can take a long time, especially on big drives. Just let it run its course.
The enhanced Photos app may also share the blame. It likes to scan and study every single photo on your Mac so it can learn the faces of the people you take pictures of. This, too, takes time (and is processor-intensive).
Minor Eccentric Behavior
All kinds of glitches may befall you, occasionally, in macOS. A menu doesn’t open when you click it. A program doesn’t open—it just bounces in the Dock a couple of times and then stops. An app freezes.
When a single program is acting up like this, but quitting and restarting ...
Get macOS Catalina: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
