I couldn't agree more, mixture. Corporal punishment and dead horse spring to mind every Wednesday afternoon. I give my own desktop the same treatment, including the defrag, in less time than the Malwarebytes scan takes on the Presario - which is why I want to do anything I can to speed up the bit which requires my presence. The whole machine works noticeably faster on a Wednesday evening but is this down to the defrag or the CrapCleaning etc.? I suspect that it's the defrag which plays the bigger part so doing that overnight on Tuesday might speed up the security stuff but perhaps the defrag would be compromised by only clearing the crap out afterwards. Is it reasonable to run the defrag and the backup at the same time overnight (i.e. would they sort things out between them?) or am I risking the reliability of the backup?