Easiest crash ever

My computer crashed Friday, happily after I filed my last story of the week.

I noticed that it wasn't recognizing a USB thumb drive when I plugged it in, so I did a restart and ended up with this screen. I've seen it a couple of times before and it always recovered and launched Windows eventually.

Not this time. I let it go overnight and called Dell customer support on Saturday morning. I spent a couple of hours on the phone with a techie, trying various solutions and getting nowhere. He finally admitted defeat, declared my computer probably dead and said my best option was to let him send me packing materials and ship my computer to their repair facility in Texas where there was a high probability that they would wipe the 1TB hard drive.

That was somewhat distressing, but I realized I had backed up most of my photos to the Western Digital 2TB Cloud Drive I got earlier this year from the Amazon Vine Program.

I had never paid any attention to the Microsoft OneDrive until yesterday afternoon when I found that pretty much all of my photos and all of my documents were backed up there, meaning the only thing I could lose would be some programs (or apps, as we're supposed to call them now).

I moved over to Maria's desktop and created an identity for myself there this morning and installed Google Chrome. I was delighted to see all of my personalized Chrome features and bookmarks carried over as well, so it's almost like having my old computer again. We bought both desktop computers at the same time in September, 2017.

My biggest challenge at the moment is tracking down the installation CD for my most recent version of Photoshop so I can continue shooting and editing photos in Nikon RAW format.