That’s not quite what I meant about drivers but I’m not going to belabor the issue, I phrased myself badly. Moving on.
Framework Laptop BIOS and Driver Releases (11th Gen Intel® Core™) 3.10 is the latest provided in the KB for 11th gen, last updated August 1 2022. The only other version I see is a beta for 3.17 here 11th Gen Intel Core BIOS 3.17 Beta - given everything, I will wait until 3.17 is official.
Knowing that SSDs can be opaque when it comes to issues is helpful.
The type of BSOD errors I’ve gotten during the process are typically blamed on either bad drivers or bad ram. After exhausting driver fixes I moved to replace the ram which obviously backfired. Also I can safely say that memtest64 was a waste of time. I wanted to use a tool that would allow me to drop the test and resume work immediately if I had to, clearly not worth the compromise in quality of testing.
I think the order you mentioned here is exactly it. At least a little frustrating given that Crucial has historically been reliable ram, ime. Entirely possible I’m responsible for the original drive being hosed, since it wasn’t seated right originally. That style of drive is entirely new to me, and since it’s not uncommon for there to be visible connector with ram modules, I didn’t think anything of there being visible connector on the drive, especially since the screw went into place without issue.
So barring any future crashes, it seems like this was just difficult to diagnose hardware failures. Sheesh. Thanks again for being an extra set of eyes, people. Considering this closed.