Perplexing laptop....
My better half has an obsolescent Compaq running Vista. It has a 100Gb hard disc and 1Gb of memory. In spite of having been a programmer of the very old school (KDF9!), she's just little interested in protecting and caring for it. I have taken advantage of her periodic absences to set up the Windows firewall, free Avast, Spybot and the free version of Malwarebytes. All of these are kept very up to date and Malwarebytes and Spybot get run manually once a week for a full scan, with very, very few catches. Inevitably the hard disc is filling up and increasing sluggishness made me install and run CrapCleaner and Defraggler fairly often, bringing a fairly dramatic improvement when first used and this improvement has pretty well stuck, with only a few small ups and downs since.
So far so good and so standard but there is something happening now and again which seems odd to me. When I first began using CrapCleaner and Defraggler the hard disc was about two thirds full and the machine ran acceptably well. On one occasion about three months ago I ran CrapCleaner having selected the option to wipe any free space. When that finally finished I ran Defraggler and found that the hard disc was now only about 40% full - I had found almost 30Gb new free space! Now that seems a pretty significant amount, in the context of a 100Gb disc - especially as it had never happened before, even though the same combination of clean-up stuff had been run each time. I put it down to the wiping of the free space, smiled happily and went about my business. The free space stayed about the same through the next few weekly cleanups.
However, a month later I noticed while defragging that the disc space used had gone back up to about 70% again in the space of one week. Odd, I thought.
Well, she's off to the UK for a week so I've got her machine to myself and I ran CrapCleaner and then Defraggler and, Hey Ho!, the occupation is back down to 45% so I've turned the b***dy thing off again and will probably leave it like that until she gets back!
But that doesn't tell me what's happening..... Can anybody advise, please?