For the last few days my desktop (a relatively old Dell) has been randomly shutting down and giving me “watchdog violation” error messages. I googled that and decided there was some kind of driver incompatibility and kind of put up with it or just switched to my new Apple laptop for most tasks. Then yesterday the problem escalated and every time I turned it on it entered sleep mode and wouldn’t come back. By last night I had given up on the CPU and was becoming resigned to dealing with the one-at-a-time file recovery from my Norton backup.
Today I managed to run diagnostics, resulting in several new error codes that, when googled, warned that I had better back up my data quickly. But I couldn’t turn on the computer to back up.
On about the 15th try it worked, and I have just finished transferring all my documents and pictures to USB flash drives.
Either this is a very good sign for 2017 or I’d better watch out for some very bad luck to balance things out.