Sorry for the late response, but I'm still playing the game. My one and only metric is fun. If I'm having fun I play, if not I move onto something else. If that's in 40, 80, 1000 hours it's all good. I'm not one of those people that thinks or...
If the memory was bad and caused errors, it's likely the install, OS and otherwise, is completely hosed. Bad memory causes errors in which those errors are written to disk. It was unlikely the install was going to be saved from the beginning and...
I have a 3x2TB NVME and then a bunch of oldder SSDs slapped together in another 5 or so TB. Haven't used a spinner in my main system in years.
The file server is another story though.
Never had a problem with the AAF drivers either. They were really solid when I needed DTS Connect or DDL Live or even the SoundBlaster stuff. Agreed that some of those download sites are cancer++
That's how Windows has worked for decades, BTW ;)
Also, you can bring up a command prompt and enter a command to skip the Out Of Box Experience. Then you reboot and restart the Windows 11 install, and you can install with a local account. They...