Subject says it: about a month or so ago, my Mac started randomly rebooting. Not when I did “this”… or “that”, or even when I was in the room. Everything is rosy, and BANG! it reboots.

Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. The most common reason for that would be something hardware related. A faulty USB cable; some lose cable; perhaps a hub or switch going bad. Nope.  Bad RAM?  Nope. 

So I started looking for “BOOT_TIME” in the system console log, to find the magic reboots. Finding that I copied out all the random ones, and 20 or so lines of system events before them to see if I could find something causing it. Several times the previous lines were similar or identical… but not -all- the time, so there was no -one- trigger.

Frustrated to the extreme because I hate not solving this kind of thing, I dug in. After all this was a contest between a complex computer and a guy with over 4 decades of computer experience. I wasn’t about to give up…

…which lead me to the Font Of All Wisdom: the internet. After search for an hour, and following a zillion dead ends, I read a post from several years ago that rang a bell.

Yes: I found the solution (or at least there have been no spontaneous reboots in 48 hours.)

About the time this started, I cancelled my full Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, and reverted to the $10 Photographer one. (I wasn’t using the other stuff, and it saves a bucket of $$$.)  On doing that I just removed the old apps, and was (I thought) good to go.

Wrong.

The solution was to go get the Adobe uninstall tool for Creative Cloud. It wipes  out all the detritus, Roto-Roots everything, and I reinstalled Photoshop and LightRoom.

Bingo.

Now, the last reboot-free period could easily be due to the phase of the moon, but I’m pretty sure that the post on the Font Of All Wisdom, was the key: he cleared a mystery issue the same way.

FWIW and YMMV