Sorry to hear about the freeze, and thanks very much for the helpful attachments.

First off, let's hope that auto save was enabled and you'll be able to recover the most recent edits from the project. The default folder is C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming\CyberLink\PowerDirector\17.0\Cache\AutoSave\

You can kill PD17 with Windows Task Manager or simply reboot. There's nothing you can do to bring the editing session back at this point. Don't try opening up PD again until you've followed all of the next steps:

The quickest way to check the health of your laptop is is to use the Dell diagnostic tool here and then go to the Drivers & Downloads page and use the Check for Updates tool.

Hopefully one or both of those tools will find & fix any Windows issues and make sure that you've got the most recent drivers installed. You do have the most recent Dell-certified driver for your Intel HD Graphics 530 GPU, although there are newer versions available from Intel. If any problems persist you may want to try that, but for now it's ok to use the current version.

Finally, PD17 is at build 2514 according to the crash log (WER events) at the end of the DxDiag report. The latest version is 5003 and you can download it from here. ONce you've installed it, see if you can open up the saved project.

Please let us know if these steps work. I also hope you'll help your son see how important it is to save his work (aka this is surely a teachable moment )

Thank you.

Firstly, yes there was an autosave file that I was able to retrieve. I have applied all the updates and updated PD17 to version 5003 as instructed and I managed to retrieve the project with only about 5 mins worth of the final edits missing (an easy fix).

Thanks for the detailed response and hopefully a valuable lesson has been learned.

Greatly appreciate your assistance.