It's totally reasonable to chalk it up to cosmic rays (2007)

ECC is indeed a pretty important feature.

But I guess people need first random RAM bit flips to cause trouble for them. That's what happened to me about 10 years ago, I nearly lost 200 GB of encrypted backup data.

I've been using ECC ever since. Random userland crashes, kernel panics and blue screens have become extremely rare occurrences. Pretty good for just $100-200 higher system cost.

It feels risky to use a computer without ECC for anything remotely important.

I just wish laptops with ECC support were more available.

There was an article where they showed how to dump the image of the application from memory and compare it to disk image. On linux. And it was just one bit flipped.