Fortunately, I had at least two unreliable computers of my own to experiment upon.
Intermittent troubles are very difficult to track down.
I will describe the test I now use to answer that question. The Test Compiling the kernel of the Linux operating system uses the resources of the computer so intensely that it makes a good test of the hardware. This may take a leap of faith at first, but I will try to explain why I think it is a reasonable hypothesis. You might think that the compile blowing up means a software bug in the compiler. But, if that were true, you would expect the compile to blow up at the same place each time.