Since that incident, I’ve had several other, similar problems. Something would start failing mysteriously, but flushing my cache restored it to normal.
This seems like a bit of a red flag that in reality something else is actually going wrong with his computer.
It does. How dangerous they actually are? If it was that common for them to cause serious disruptions in the operations of our desktops and laptops, where are these faults? I mean, in the last 10 years, I simply can't remember any experience of a sudden and irreproducible computer failure that couldn't be quite convincingly attributed to something else.
I'm sure that this can happen to me, that in any particular moment, my memory can get corrupted by these rays, or something else, and then, the computer can misbehave or crash. And if I really wanted to be sure that it will not, I'd need to have some kind of protection against it. But compared to many other possible faults, is it really anything more than a very very rare and minor reason of a computer failure that I simply can just discard on my laptop, which is nowhere near a "critical and vital" system?
Going by the 12GB figure, I guess he's running 6x2GB DIMMs in a Core i7 box and is pushing his memory controller slightly over its limits.
I used to run 6x2GB at 1333MHz with an i7 920. I swapped the CPU with one that could properly drive my ECC memory (W3520), and quickly found my choices were either an unusable system, 3x2GB at 1333, or 6*2GB at 800.
This seems like a bit of a red flag that in reality something else is actually going wrong with his computer.