Well, I think Microsoft have finally killed my laptop with the software updates it keeps forcing on me.

Well, the good news is that you will almost certainly be able to recover the family photos, given a little work. A windows update is pretty unlikely to do anything bad to them.

Just give it a while and see what happens. It will probably either get better or worse and then you can decide that to do next.

And for heaven's sake, back up your stuff.

You can get the photos without having to go into the os. Although you'll most likely need a sata to usb-a adapter. Then you can just use it as a removable drive and navigate to where on the drive the pics are stored.

I had to replace my hard drive, on my laptop, for the same reason. Thankfully I had a policy already paid up, because these things never happen when I have extra money.

Then I had a tech come out to the house, and he mentioned that hard drives are caused to fail by over-use of apps, like Honey and many others.

Prepare for a stinging!

Tech companies do that on purpose my laptop hasn’t worked right since the last software update I was forced to download. That way you’ll be forced to by a new one

well ....you can send it to a recovery lab and they can get a lot off most of them for about 1000.00

guess it depends on the wife

Why don't you just try to exercise patience and let the update work its way through?

Microsoft upgrades are SO heavy.
It's pathetic.