Thank you for that very welcome information, Mixture. I want to get it right first time but I am no longer so flexible that I want to guddle about for longer than necessary but I don't want to have to revisit it either. My machine has always been fairly quick for an oldie (Pentium with two 3.20 cores) but it's doing everything noticeably quicker now with W7 and its new 1TB Seagate. Happy days are here again!
I'll just go and turn it on again so that I can leave my wife's laptop in peace.