I checked on local computer repair businesses and there are several that are highly rated by customers and Angie’s List. At least one of them does house calls, so when this happens again, I’ll give them a shout. I’ve turned off the auto-reboot feature, so will be able to write down the pertinent BSOD codes.
You might be better served by finding out what’s unique about your setup that’s causing this. 
Seriously, not to defend MS Office or anything, but I find crashes on it are extremely rare. I use it for work and while it’s behaviors are quirky it at least has the decency to run when I want. It certainly isn’t so bad as to necessitate downloading some FOSS stuff. Non-native interfaces on the Mac drive me crazy; bad enough I have to put up with Adobe’s cross-platform Flash-based crap.
[hijack]
I’m a PC guy and I recently fixed a friend’s Windows laptop that had become really slow. Long story short it’s because he’s not tech savvy and he watches a lot of online porn. Consequently it was full of spyware, malware, viruses etc. I cleaned it up but it’s since gotten slow again. He asked me if a new Mac laptop would be more immune to this. Would it?
not “immune,” just “safer.” I like to put it this way:
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Using Windows is like living in a big city. You have everything you could possibly need available to you, but you need to have bars on your windows, a guard dog, reinforced doors, and a gun. Because the bad guys are constantly trying to get in.
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Using a Mac is like living in a rural area. You might not have everything available to you, but you have a nice house, and you can leave your front door unlocked because your nearest neighbor is half a mile away.
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Using Linux is like living on Antarctica. Nobody there but you and the penguins
Yeah, not immune, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve been surfing porn on my Mac and gotten an alert warning me, “Your computer is not Win-32 compatible”. Pretty good indication that the page was trying to load something funny. That hasn’t happened in a while, though.
I second using this tool to check your ram. It’s open source, and has found many a hard to track down RAM problem at work. I work for a hosting company, we have around 4k machines, bad RAM is not that rare. Less rare than failing hard drives, but it’s the second most likely to be in need of replacement.
If you’re personally not able to translate the memory addresses to a particular stick on the board, you can isolate the stick by splitting the ram in half, and re-testing until you’ve isolated the bad stick.
However one balances that with the fact that things so rarely go wrong with Linux now, one rarely needs help. It’s generally a hardware failure.
There’s a reason 97% of supercomputers run on Linux, and it’s not because of the cost of Windows licences.
Those 97% are not running GUIs.
Sorry to break it to you, but every Linux GUI (and the fact that there is no single standard is a further problem) is a joke compared to Windows and OSX. A bad, bad joke.
KDE works just fine, as do Xfce, LCDE, Enlightenment etc… ( I never liked GNOME. )
Why having a choice in Desktop Environments, enabling people to work with what they prefer, would be a ‘further problem’ is inconceivable. Not everyone wants the soviet single model.
There is definitely a place for The Great Fatberg, Microsoft, in personal computing; but apart from games or applications specifically made for their or Apple’s systems, I can’t imagine anything either system can do that is not done on Linux or BSD. Usually more simply and elegantly.
I guess it’s not really a matter of how often it crashes. It’s that everything else is so stable, Office winds up a huge portion of your crashes, and meanwhile there’s Office for Windows which is extremely stable. Even aside from stability issues Office for Windows is just so much better designed.
Office for Mac is bad enough that if I had to work with Office a big part of every day, I’d just switch to Windows.
Looks like that program downloads to a either a thumb drive or a CD?
yep. bootable ISO image. this is the one you want: http://www.memtest86.com/
there was another one (called memtest86+) but that seems to have been abandoned.
Got it downloaded and onto a USB drive (after some deciphering of their instructions). Apparently I need to press an F key while booting the computer to get it to run; just not sure which one.
Oh nonsense. I run Ubuntu on my laptop, and I get all sorts of weirdness here and there. WiFi dropouts, the time and date will disappear from the menu bar, compiz will shit the bed and stop responding, etc. and the GPU drivers are almost universally shit.
(now here is where the FOSS excuse making usually starts. “It’s not Linux, it’s Unity/closed-source drivers/Canonical/it must be your hardware/RTFMP.” Sorry, in order to use Linux I need a lot of other stuff on top of it; I can’t do anything with just a kernel.)
What- apart from the ability to modify it to their needs- would be the reason, then?
brand/model of system?
I should add that after downloading the memtest program, I’m getting constant “aw snap” windows from Google Chrome. Sigh.
[hijack again]
Again, I know nothing about Macs but I do have an iPhone. Does the Mac OS support Flash? If not wouldn’t this severely limit its ability to surf porn sites?
Windows doesn’t crash “constantly” without hardware failure or user misuse and/or failure to do basic maintenance, like never deleting temporary internet files, never defragging, and downloading things indiscriminately so the computer is full of spyware, malware, and some viruses.
If the OP still wants to switch to a Mac, he can (if necessary) run Windows virtually. Some people do that if they want to run a Mac and have some legacy tools/macros/etc on the windows side.
Absolutely never neglect these issues. I run virus and malware scans daily, rarely open email attachments, defrag and clean regularly, and don’t cruise iffy websites. If there is a nasty bug, it’s disguising itself really well. That said, my wife uses that computer more than I do, so I can’t swear that it hasn’t been exposed. She gets a shitpot full of emails because of the tour scheduling she does for the museum, but they’re basically just responses and don’t contain executable files.
The fact that I don’t get these problems, and I am probably less computer-able than you, indicates it’s not Linux.
Then again I stick with German engineering: OpenSUSE, the Oompah Band of Linux.
However, Linux help could be 100 times better, particularly at Init 3 — where typing ‘help’ is stupendously unhelpful; but then again I never found Windows Error Codes self-explanatory either.
[ For non-linuxers, Init 3 corresponds to the DOS level in some Windows, where you install NVidia drivers and such. ]
Reliability would be a start: just set it and forget it. You really think people spending $100 million on hardware care about the miniscule cost of licensing ? Also it’s scalability, lots of tools, widest support for different hardware etc. — even Cray now runs it’s own Cray Linux Environment.
A Linux based tool.
However, I would never encourage the OP or anyone to use what I use ( Linux in this case ) unless they want to. In his case I would think Apple may be the way to go. ( A form of BSD actually. )
Or for Windows, one of those Clean Slate things, such as this, which discards all changes each reboot.