Ok a 51GB hard drive seems small. And you say you only have 9GB free. That is not much. It may all being used by the pagefile so no wonder it's slow. Now you say your files are missing. Do you mean missing from your desktop, or did you go to windows Explorer and look at the root of your hard drive and saw the folders missing? If the files and folders was really wiped from the drive you would think you would have more free space on your drive? Dallas