They're using my previous PC which I sent to them as a gift when building my current PC. It's got decent specs and 16GB ram but they are the sort to have anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred Chrome tabs open across a handful of windows plus BlueStacks (an Android VM/emulator tool) open with a few instances of mobile gacha games plus whatever actual PC game he's playing. The other day his computer "couldn't open youtube" so after some troubleshooting it turned out he'd filled up his entire ram (16GB) and his entire swapdisk (set to 32GB on the main C: drive, which was an SSD) but it overflowed and continued going until the C drive itself was full, somewhere around like 75GB of ram being used because he left everything running for over 9 days without ever closing anything.
So long as they continue to insist on using Chrome and leaving half a dozen emulators/virtual machines spun up 24/7 while also leaving things like final fantasy running "in the background", no amount of tossing more CPU/RAM at the problem will fix it; Chrome itself shouldn't be using up 50+GB of ram but it's Chrome, so it has memory leaks every other day, and he's fixing the crux of the issue by ditching Chrome (also has had some security issues recently and we JUST did a malware cleanup this week as well due to a Chrome issue so just another reason he's trying to ditch it in favor of Firefox)
I really do appreciate the input though. It can be frustrating (as an autism myself) to ask "Hey how do I do A" and everyone responds with "don't do A, do B or C instead" but I have to do A for a very specific set of reasons. Even still, it's nice to see that everyone is at least pitching in with extra info and advice, just in case.