Back to a working bench
Display and touch recovered, system updates completed, and the remaining audio problem stayed visible.
Before Ash could hold a conversation, the bench needed to work reliably again. The monitor could display windows, but touch was missing. Changing the USB connection to a different port on the monitor restored touch. Display recovery also cleared the visible static and blank-screen symptoms.
The operating system update completed, and after reboot the display and touch were working. We kept the distinction between that result and a complete system qualification: a successful desktop restart does not retest every earlier service.
The monitor speaker remained unresolved. Rather than record that as fixed, we left it open and continued the voice work with a separate playback route. That decision let the conversation pipeline move forward without disguising a hardware limitation.