Dan noticed that the computer wouldn’t boot, so I looked into it a bit. When attempting to boot, the hard drive (HDD) was making a clicking noise; this is never a good sign.
I replaced the HDD with a clone of the existing (now dead) HDD that I had created back on 20150422 and everything is mostly back to normal.
What hasn’t returned to normal is the usage of Dropbox. Sometime this summer, Dropbox stopped supporting Windows XP and no longer allows usage of the Dropbox app on Windows XP computers. For the time being, this means that all files saved on this computer should be uploaded to Dropbox via a web browser.
Saving files to the Dropbox folder that still exists on this computer will NOT sync! That means they will NOT be backed up.
To resolve this issue, we would need to upgrade to Windows 7. Once I obtain a new backup HDD to create a new clone, I’ll attempt to upgrade this computer to Windows 7. The main reservation I have about this is that the two key pieces of software installed on this computer (Nikon Elements and SPOT) are extremely old and may not function on a newer Windows version. But, I guess we won’t know until we try!
Below are images of the steps I took to replace the dead HDD: