Report on my evolving answer :

My answer did pinpoint the problem as bad RAM with my suggestion to run MemTest86. A pity that it was deleted by a moderator, so the poster put up his own answer. I still think that my deleted answer described a good and useful procedure.

The current state of the post is :

• There are 11 comments on the post. It's probably approaching the state where a moderator will sweep everything under the carpet into a conversation.
• My answer is smeared over 4 comments.
• I never got any feedback on my answer that was converted to a comment by a moderator, probably because the poster didn't understand anything in view of its format.
• The comments have reached a chaotic stage where it became hard to distinguish answers and responses. Luckily I tutored the poster on the @user syntax.

My own conclusion, and my private criteria of when to use a comment or an answer when not enough data is available for giving a final answer:

• If the question(s) to the poster are simple enough and fit into one comment, it should be used. I usually separate the questions in this case with an enumerator.
• If there are several questions to be asked and putting them all into one comment without any structure will be confusing for the poster, an answer should be used, but only with the expectation of reaching a conclusion.
• An answer that only got negative responses from the poster and led nowhere should be deleted by its author.
• Too much and too quick an intervention by a moderator should be avoided, as it may actually hinder a solution from being found.

In conclusion, I would think that some moderator should undelete my answer, but delete still all the comments below it. This will allow me to clean up my comments from below the post.

Report on my evolving answer :

My answer did pinpoint the problem as bad RAM with my suggestion to run MemTest86. A pity that it was deleted by a moderator, so the poster put up his own answer. I still think that my deleted answer described a good and useful procedure.

The current state of the post is :

• There are 11 comments on the post. It's probably approaching the state where a moderator will sweep everything under the carpet into a conversation.
• My answer is smeared over 4 comments.
• I never got any feedback on my answer that was converted to a comment by a moderator, probably because the poster didn't understand anything in view of its format.
• The comments have reached a chaotic stage where it became hard to distinguish answers and responses. Luckily I tutored the poster on the @user syntax.

My own conclusion, and my private criteria of when to use a comment or an answer when not enough data is available for giving a final answer:

• If the question(s) to the poster are simple enough and fit into one comment, it should be used. I usually separate the questions in this case with an enumerator.
• If there are several questions to be asked and putting them all into one comment without any structure will be confusing for the poster, an answer should be used, but only with the expectation of reaching a conclusion.
• An answer that only got negative responses from the poster and led nowhere should be deleted by its author.
• Too much and too quick an intervention by a moderator should be avoided, as it may actually hinder a solution from being found.

In conclusion, I would think that some moderator should undelete my answer, but delete still all the comments below it. This will allow me to clean up my comments from below the post.

EDIT

I have copy-pasted my deleted finally-evolved answer to a new answer, which was upvoted and accepted by the poster.

By the number of downvotes, I can see that many people have totally missed out on the message I'm trying to pass in this example.

All I'm saying that there exist some unwritten rules that some moderators have imposed on our SU site. These rules do not, for example, exist on SO, where many answers would have been converted to comments by our moderators.

Some unanswered questions I have are :

1. Why should incorrect answers be kept on our site? Or by extension, should all answers except the accepted one be deleted as not answering the question?
2. Why should answers that provides a procedure for finding the solution be considered as unsuitable, to be converted into a comment? Mine is an example.
3. When there are many comments under a post and it gets harder to follow who said what, wouldn't it be clearer if they were divided among answers, rather than continue in this spaghetti?
4. Is sweeping too many comments into a conversation, or deleting them, a solution to what I call comments-hell?

All these questions I had hoped to demonstrate with this answer, but evidently I have only encountered discord.