Display driver failure problem and burnt pot accident

[Winston]

Two questions:

1. Lately, my display driver keeps failing. The screen will go blank for a while, and then when it reappears, there is a message in the corner saying "The display driver has failed, but recovered". It happens frequently now and is very annoying.

Sometimes it will crash my browser too, so that I have to close it and restart it. This happens particularly when I am on YouTube.

I went to Device Manager in my Control Panel and updated the driver, but that has not fixed the problem.

Is this a software problem or a hardware one? Any suggestions?

2. Also, one time when I was boiling water in a pot to cook hard boiled eggs, I went on the computer and forgot the time. After an hour, I smelled burning so I went downstairs and saw that the water in the pot had evaporated and the bottom of the pot had burnt on the flame since it was empty. Now it looks black and rusted at the bottom.

Is it bad to cook with it? Does the rust contaminate food or water? Is there a way to repair this, such as using silver stainless steel paint? I tried to Google this problem but the articles were vague and only talked about using baking soda to clean it out.

Thanks.