What I did to fix my crashes. I was wrong, it was my hardware after all

[Millertyme]

Long story short, 1 bad Ram stick was behind it all.

The Story: For a few weeks in December around the time of Windows 11 I started encountering issues with my PC. What started as browser crashes turned into my game of choice at the time PoE2 crashes and Marvel Rivals crashes. I was looking for and using anything that what suggested as a possible fix. PojectLassso, PoEUncrasher, updated everything. Nvidia Dec 24 hotfix, overlays, visual settings, network settings, bios updates.
Some of these things made it appear like things would be temporarily fixed only for the crashes to resume.
Things got much worse....
A few days ago I swapped out my gtx 1650 for a new rtx 3050. Played PoE 2 for about 20 minutes and the game would crash. After some more crashing/blue screen my PC got stuck in an endless boot cycle, never reaching windows. I replaced the 3050 with the old 1650 and the same result.
The next day I pulled out my old PC and updated windows 10 (not eligible for 11 on that PC) updated graphics card (gtx 750) and installed PoE2. It took that PC about 30 minutes to log into my character, I had 10-20 fps in hideout. GAME DID NOT CRASH! At this point I knew my crashes could be windows 11 related, wasn't my 1650 gtx card. I shut down this PC and hooked up the hard drive to my main PC that's in a boot loop thinking maybe windows 11 is corrupted on my SSD. With the help of my brother we are able to boot up windows 10 from the hard drive. Windows booted up no problems (Ruled out a PSU at this point, leaning more to corrupt windows or other file(s) on the SSD) We clean wipe the SSD and purchase a new windows 10 key. Fresh install windows 10 onto the SSD. Get that all set up and restart the PC. Entered the BIOS and changed the boot up back to SSD and disconnected the hard drive. Reboot the PC and it didn't get stuck in a boot loop
During browser installs, windows updates, steam installs, poe DL's the computer continued to crash and blue screen.
Last night I left twitch on a streamers channel and went to bed. When I woke up 8 hours later the streamer was still on and my PC didn't blue screen. I closed twitch and resumed PoE2 DL. Crashed to another blue screen. Eventually got the game installed and was able to play about 20 minutes before another crash. Tried watching a movie, another crash. My brother came over and I talked about the crashes more and we decided to check Ram today and CPU we didn't have a way to test mother board. I have 2 Ram sticks so this was easy but we took out 1 stick and booted up the PC. As soon as windows opened the PC blue screened. We tried it again, same result. We swapped that stick out for the other stick.
I have not had a single crash on browser or during any PoE2 gameplay since then, has been a few hours. As more time passes it becomes more obvious that the other stick was bad.
I would have never thought 1 bad Ram stick would cause so much issues as it has (specially when I had 2 of them)
Looking at crashes in the event viewer and trying to fix them was never the issue. It's was just 1 bad Ram stick.

If you're still crashing, blue screening and waiting for a magical patch to fix your problems these past few weeks, you might want to take a look at your hardware

Good Luck
Cheers everyone

[cushy77]

looks like updating windows did ya in.....Ol Bills still tryin to block out the sky and our games!