I'll get to the point, eventually.
My pal's Vista HP in the UK had all the photos she'd ever taken all on that one disc. She was afraid to CClean it just in case she lost her work. The machine eventually ground to a stop, I don't know if it was just over burdened with cr@p, or another glitch appeared on the hard drive, but it sat there with the little circle spinning for up to two hours. (I know
) even dropping it on the table didn't make it go. (really)
She's nice, but she's Australian.
I set about getting the photos off, but I didn't want to risk a recover, since in the past I've had that procedure reset the partitions with the loss of all data - so I did it the hard way with Ubuntu. When I'd got them off, I simply tried my Vista recover disc and windows repaired the OS after about 6- 7 minutes.
Now, CCleaner made it run reasonably well. Quite a nice standby computer with super camera and posh sound. Shame to throw it away.
My similar age Vaio is dual boot, and I can make dinner while it settles down on Vista, but it's 3 gigs serves W7 well - a practical machine. Even two gigs will work reasonably well. on 7.