Ahhhh....

Running SpinRite.

Meanwhile, I can do some work on my personal PC. Not real work, but at least i can browse webpages and read manuals. I.e. learn. Which was actually what i was doing when these reliability problems (3 hangs, and OneNote data lossages) happened.

I may already have noted this, but:

A few months ago I read an article in some CEO or Entrepreneur magazine. (No, I don't normally read such; it was the best choice while waiting for my shawarma).

Rough title: "habits and tricks of web CEOs".

Of special note: of circa 10 interviewees. 3 or 4 said that one of the best "tricks" was having extra PCs. So that when one Pc was hung or rebooting, you could work on the (or an) other PC.

Which is basically what I am doing now, and have been doing since this flurry happened: rebooting and/or doing preventive maintenance (SpinRite) on one PC, while continuing to work on another PC.

I'm using physical PCs.

I wonder if virtual PCs would be similar. E.gl. I wonder if I worked in virtual machines on top of my main PC, if a useful fraction of bugs would occur in one virtual machime - which I could reboot, while working on the others.

Versus, bugs that hit the VMM itself. On the host.

I suspect that it would be useful. There will always be bugs on the host. E.g. display driver bugs. But I suspect that most bugs are due to application or OS (guest) problems. (Although perhaps not today, if my fear about hard disk sectors going bad is conformed by SpinRite.)

Best if the guest VMs are isolated. But nobody wants full isolation. E.g. ultimately I want all of my work to be in one place. Especially if using cloud apps from either guest VM: the cloud apps could be a single common point of failure.

It might be nice is work was done into a replicated, distributed, version control system. Like git. Then work separately, and merge when (if) both mguest VMs are up.