I had all of the above problems on my other laptop. Solved them all by sticking in a Win7 disk and choosing the upgrade option.

Everything was kept and I could access everything 10 times quicker also.

Thankyou for your ideas. I'm sorry but I've been away a lot over the last two days and have been golfing and partying for the rest of the time. What a tough life!

I'll certainly have a look at that defragmenter, thank you, vulcanised.

CrapCleaner removes very little, Spurlash2, as I said above in my detailed report posting. It seems to be use and Defraggler which has been adding the Gbs!
Perhaps you mean which little boxes I have checked for its working; most of the obvious stuff but Madame doesn't like me cleaning things like internet cache and browsing history. I certainly have nothing adventurous ticked. I can't get my hands on the offending laptop at this moment but I'm pretty sure that System Restore will be enabled. I don't understand how you think that this might be affecting things though. I am seeing swings from 40 to most recently 75Gb which virtually amounts to doubling disc usage,after all.

That seems a good idea in any event by my book, ex matelot, Vista has a really bad reputation and I have wondered if the old MS offer of reverting to XP might be a good idea on such a space-limited machine (if it can be done without losing everything) but I hadn't thought of W7.

Hi vulcanised. I went to the Auslogic website and went to start to download the defragmenter's exec file and this was interrupted with the advice that I should use their speed booster first so I took that advice and ran what appeared to be a two week free trial. It came up with a big number of junk files and one or two other things but told me that they thought that fragmentation wasn't a problem and invited me to click to fix the 15,000 junk files. As soon as I did they said, effectively, "well, actually, we're not going to let you do that - you may fix 15 of them but to do more you've got to cough up the nearly $50 for a working version though they would give me a small discount if I did it absolutely right now but that offer was absolutely not repeatable". When I uninstalled it 30 seconds later they did in fact repeat that unrepeatable offer - actually I think it was a marginally better discount this time. I'm sorry but that type of "chancer's" approach is exactly what I hate so I continued with the uninstall and shall never darken their door again. I suspected more or less what I got when I saw that their original intro page had lots of the text jumbled up and scribbled over other bits so that parts were more or less unreadable. They had obviously read the book on "How to get yourself a justifiably bad name!" I'm afraid I didn't go back for their defragmenter. Indeed the only useful thing which I got out of the exercise was that the speed booster said that my drive didn't need defragging! However, thank you for what was certainly very well meant advice.

Saab Dastard, it has taken me these few days for me to realise that I had already actually noticed that while the full Defraggler gave me the very odd behaviour whose listing surely bored everyone to death, the Quick Defraggler behaved exactly as I should expect with the used/unused stats remaining absolutely unchanging throughout the process - stranger and stranger.......

Sorry to hear about your experience !

I have learned that, when going for these things always ignore the siren calls on the way.