New (to me) Raspberry Pi 400 keeps freezing when attempting to download/install updates

[/RaspberryPi]

This is becoming a little problematic, because I can't upgrade the system, and it leaves apt in a tattered state with dpkg locks afterwards.
I had downloaded an older image of Raspberry Pi OS based on buster, and attempted to just do a upgrade through apt, and it froze up in the middle of installing packages. Not sure if the upgrade was just doomed from the start, or if it was because it froze up in the middle of it, but it ended up in a pretty broken system--no wireless/lan connection manager in the panel, for some reason the background wallpaper was gone, etc.
So I decided to just start over and got the newest RPI image based on bullseye and installed it, and during the initial setup when it wanted to download updates, it then hung up on me once again. At least this time it wasn't during package installation so I could just start it over, but I'm worried it's going to hang up again at some point during update and leave things in a bad state.
I suspect my power adapter may not be supplying adequate power under high CPU load. I read somewhere that a 3.5 A adapter is needed, but the one I have only has 3.0. However, I also read that a lot of that power rating was simply for USB peripherals?
Google'ing around it seems that others suggest it could be the microSD card I installed. This seems like it could make sense as well, considering there's a lot of reading/writing happening during package download/install. However, the microSD card is a Sandisk fresh out of the package. The only thing that I found to cause my suspicion of it is that the larger ones are sometimes kind of wonky, and this one is 64 GB.
The only other thing I could think of is that maybe the Pi itself is defective. It was given to me by my sister's boyfriend, but he's given me lots of tech gear before that's always worked fine so I doubt it's just some broken junk he didn't want.

submitted by /u/kennbr
[link] [comments]

More...