An hour ago, I had to hard reset my laptop again because Mathematica froze the system again. When import a large file or make a mistake that produces huge arrays with complicated entries etc., I often see that the system becomes unresponsive. Holding the power button for seconds seems to be the only solution.
I was forced to do so about 20 times in recent 3 months, because of a project I was working at. Today, chkdsk had to start already when Windows was starting which I think is creepy. No errors found on the disk, thank God.
Is there a way to constrain this behavior so that it doesn't become hopeless? Some setting which makes Mathematica say "I give up, low memory" instead of doing the impossible and suicidal caching?
$Pre = Function[Null, MemoryConstrained[Unevaluated @ #, 2^32, "Memory Exceeded"], HoldAll]
(see (30600)) -- it doesn't always work but it seems to most of the time. $\endgroup$