My iMac M1 Is Possessed—And It’s Slow

Well, not slow, but not that fast. My 2017 iMac is faster. Lots of spinning beachballs when I’m opening folder windows or scrolling through long documents. Not the blazing speed I’d expected from the M1 chip.

But worse, it seems that Loki did the coding for Monterey—or at least the Monterey that’s on my computer. Some examples:

The Blue Border of Death (blue is my chosen accent color). Without warning, a border will appear around the window I’m working in. It could be an app window, or a URL address window, or a Save window. When the border appears, weird stuff happens—usually I will not be able to type spaces between words. Or I’ll be typing in, say Word, and the border appears and I’m typing in a Quick Note.

Uninvited Logins. Chrome, Word, Photoshop Elements 2021 and other apps open at login but I don’t want them to open at login and there seems to be no way to make them stop.

Cursor Craziness. I’ll be typing a document and the cursor will suddenly jump to another part of the document. Sometimes I’ll type a bunch of words in the wrong place before I realize it. In Pages, I’ll be typing and suddenly I’m typing in the footer.

Chrome Capers:

Chrome launches twice. I’ve followed suggestions in the forums but nothing helps.

When I click on an image thumbnail in an image search (to see the image in the sidebar) the Search By Image window opens, with a list of suggestions and will not let me open the image in the sidebar.

I’ll bye typing a search string into the URL address window and suddenly a new search page appears and Im typing in THAT address window, so I have parts of the search string in two different places.

Am I the only one who has these issues?