Hi all, thanks so much for the help in my previous post about selecting components which were a new motherboard, cpu, gfx card and ram (my SSD isn't changing). I'm nearly ready to try and install the components but had a couple more questions regarding Windows and if anyone could help with this I'd be very grateful. I've already done a bit of research on it, but I'm getting different answers from different places so wanted to see what you guys think.

When I install the components, I don't want to have to format my SSD if I can avoid it. From what I've read it looks like I might be able to do that, but might need to re-activate Windows Home. The issue I have there is that I bought a physical copy of it years ago and have long since lost the disk. If I use a program to get the product key, can I put Windows Home on a USB and use that instead, along with my product key?

Another thing I've seen mentioned a lot is flashing the bios, but I don't even know what that means nor how to do it, so if anyone could give me any pointers on that I'd be so grateful. These are all very noob questions, because it's not something I've done before myself but I'm keen to learn!

The motherboard I now have is an ASUS PRIME B550M-A WIFI II. Please let me know any other info I should add to this post if any. Thanks for any help.