Jay was working along 'on his side' and the screen sort of froze. We call 'logged in under his account' as 'side'. Only the mouse seemed responsive. Even the magic 3-key trick failed to bring up the Windows Task Manager. A lengthy force on the power switch caused a reboot. Everything seemed to run in super slow motion and programs or pages in Chrome would not open. This Toshiba has an extremely quiet hard drive so I was surprised when I managed to get into the Task Manager and saw 100% disk usage.
I restarted a few times and left Windows 8.1 at the account-selection screen during nap time. Now, things are working like a charm. Honestly, I guess I used to be familiar with such Windows behaviour in the good old days. Yet, Windows 8.1 seems to run flawlessly. As in the last version, the computer goes for weeks without needing to be rebooted.
For a few moments today, I revisited that lonely feeling of dread. Nowadays, a system crash should be of less concern. There's nothing residing on this computer that isn't in the cloud. For example, I know I can sign into Chrome from anywhere and have my bookmarks and settings come along for the ride. All my files and photos are in the cloud. There are even enough devices around this house so we'd not miss a single important email or Facebook posting! It would be an inconvenience to have to buy a new notebook though.
I don't know why the hard disk activity was maxed out today. Maintenance occurs automatically when the device isn't being used. Could it be something to do with the downloading of Windows 10 files? I don't think upgrades related to that event occur for at least another six weeks. Maybe I'll never know what made the computer unusable for an hour. I guess it doesn't matter.