I have been stymied - after disconnecting the old SSD in my parents' computer, and installing Windows on an old hard drive, their computer continues to have problems. I assumed I must have been wrong about the SSD drive, so reconnect it and install Windows again - only I can't even get through an install because a single reboot on the SSD, and the motherboard goes straight to Nero Boot Loader. I reinstall on the hard drive, and pull a stick of RAM - not a fix, but an improvement. I pull the other stick, and steal a couple of sticks from my own computer - I have seen a brief graphical glitch on Chrome, but aside from that, the computer SEEMS to run a lot better - I have told my mom to go on a Plex watching binge to see how the computer handles it. I stuck the suspect sticks of RAM in my own computer, and have Memtest86 running - before I headed to work this morning, the sticks had gone through 4 passes without any errors showing up, but I've left it running, and will check again when I'm home from work,
I am trying hard to avoid the conclusion that it's the motherboard - and it is hard to nail it down when there is an old SSD, an old HD, and an old power supply in play at the moment. The HD while in the previous computer, honestly had not been used for anything for years, certainly not for an OS, so it's hard to know if it is a contributing factor or not. The SSD seems to almost certainly have been. The RAM - results so far seem to indicate it is, even if testing it doesn't confirm that. If they ARE healthy sticks, they are on the motherboard's compatibility list, and my cousin just recently set up a build with the same motherboard and same RAM, and it's working great. Maybe I need to double check settings in the BIOS where I have already confirmed that the BIOS was an issue previously?