Hello all!
I'm new to this forum and I have a question.
First of all, I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop PC that I purchased last February. My OS is Windows Vista Home Premium and even though I have IE7 I am currently using Google Chrome as my default browser (I find that it runs faster and less problematic)
My PC came with Dell PC Tune-up, an all-in-one diagnostic tool that cleans the registry, supposedly defrags the memory and the hard-drives, removes system clutter and fixes any hard-drive errors.
For PC security I have CyberDefender Antispyware 2010, which I purchased last year when the subscription for my previous CD product, Early Detection Center, was due to expire. Last year one of the CD tech support people recommended that I install their own registry cleaning product, which I now have and use on a regular basis.
About 9 months ago I noticed that sometimes the amount of free space on my hard drive would become drastically reduced over a short period of time, as much as 20-30 Gb at a time; even though I had not added any significant files to my laptop.
I would run frequent scans for spyware and malware; occasionally turning up low-risk cookies or medium risk trojans and deleting them. The problem would still persist.
Back in December I downloaded and installed Piriform's Defraggler from File Hippo; because the defragging tool that is included with Windows doesn't seem to work that well (for one thing it doesn't even show any graphs during analysis or after defragging).
The problem I'm having is that after the defrag is completed, I still have anywhere from 4-32 Gb of fragmented files.
I had called one of the CyberDefender people about 2 weeks ago (they provide 24/7 free support to subscribers) and they told me one problem was that the Antispyware tool was creating a restore point every time it ran and that my PC was continuously reverting back to a previous restore point when the amount of free space was dangerously low. We had a shared chat session in which he was allowed to take control of my PC, go into the settings for Antispyware 2010 and turn off the automatic restore point setting.
That seemed to do the trick, because eventually I wound up with a free-space amount of 56 Gb; which sounds about right.
My free space is down again to 26 Gb, and I'm wondering if having both PC Tune-Up (I still have 24 months of service available) and CD's Registry Cleaner are interfering with each other. The CD Registry Cleaner also automatically backs-up the registry before cleaning out problems. The Registry Cleaner does not appear to have any way of turning off the system restore settings.
Is this simply a restore point matter?
