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Mike, I am so sorry for what has happened. I cannot imagine what that feels like. You do have your son, keep close together in this hard time. Thank you for letting us know.

Chad

Condolences to you and your family.
Looking forward to your posts here when you feel up to it.... you are always a great source if info and motivation.

Thank you all very much for the kind words. They are a genuine comfort to me. There's a huge hole in my daily life, and I'm not seeking to fill it; I'm just doing kind and generous deeds for friends and neighbors to help ease my sadness and waiting for the edges to soften a bit with time. The Windoze desktop that she and I shared died suddenly a few weeks after she did, and I naturally didn't expect either occurrence, so a lot of my hobby files and digital pictures were lost. But I'm still here, and my physical and mental health seem up to the task of carrying on. My son and I are a bit closer too, so that's a bonus.

Again, many thanks and much love to all of you.

I'm sure you know this but even if the machine expired as long as the hard drive spins things can be recovered relatively easily (unless it's encrypted)!

Welcome back, many of us have been praying for you.

I thought the same thing until I opened the case and found no spinning rust anywhere. My son is better versed on 21st century storage devices, and he pointed to a small solid-state thingamajig on the motherboard, stating that it was likely my "hard drive". The PC was about 11 years old, so I may be able to dock the thingamajig somewhere and see if it's encrypted. I'm relatively certain that it was a Windoze 8.1 machine, but I don't really know if that provides any clue of my odds of success. I'm not in any particular hurry, because I'm still sorting through tons of stuff on the ground floor, and I haven't even visited our huge attic yet.

If it's that old, it's unlikely the drive was encrypted; we'll keep our fingers crossed for your success