Upgrade or clean install to W7 Professional?

The usual recommendation is to take a gander into Task Manager and Resource Monitor to see what is using your resources---what processes, what applications, etc. Have you taken a look?

After a fresh boot, I typically use about 700 to 800 GB of RAM and have about 50 processes. A few hours later, RAM usage might be more like 1.2 GB, but CPU usage is under 5% at idle, bouncing a bit. I rarely have 60 processes.

I'm not entirely clear on what Windows likes to do after a clean install---there may be more to housekeeping than indexing---superfetch for instance.

But the longer it persists, the less likely it's "housekeeping".

I currently have ~80 processes (up for 7 hours), but a major chunk of those are google chrome, but even before the upgrade, chrome wouldn't cause a big increase in resource use.

Now that you say about 'housekeeping' and that the resource usage is initially high but then settles down as it finishes up does seem to be happening as both ram and cpu are dropping considerably from what they were soon after the upgrade.

Just a quick question, not particularly related but as Google Chrome uses a single process per tab, and each process takes about 20k mb of ram, and I tend to have a few tabs open at once (10+) would a ram upgrade aid the situation in anyway?

Thanks

A RAM upgrade won't help if you aren't using ALL the RAM you currently have.

Resource Monitor is the best way to see your RAM situation.

Here is mine; you can see I have 4 GB of RAM and over 2.5 GB unused and currently available, which is typical on my PC.

ok, thanks. Mine is fairly similar to yours, apart from the fact I have 3GB installed, so the free and standby figures are lower.

The usage of my resources does seem to be lower so its definitely settled down now.

Thanks for your help.

My point earlier was that if you used a regular retail Professional full or upgrade key then you can use it to boot the installer to Clean Reinstall Pro version as well as insert the key in Anytime Upgrade from a lower version. If it's a Anytime Upgrade key you can only use it in an Anytime Upgrade.

Step 7 in the Troubleshooting Steps I linked earlier covers how to monitor resource usage with Process Monitor.

Ok thanks.

If I were to get a new laptop with different specs and running windows 8 and I wanted to downgrade to windows 7, could I use windows system image to copy my system to the new laptop drive and would the install remain valid. And if I were to do a clean install, would the product key work on it?

Yes, but you'll either have to install in EFI mode if it's the new Win8 BIOS after disabling any Secure Boot setting in BIOS setup, or you'll have to bypass EFI mode by enabling Legacy BIOS in BIOS setup, removing EFI boot disk from BIOS boot order then wiping the HD with Diskpart Clean Command to clean the slate for an MBR disk format.

You can try to image Win7 over but it most likely won't start due to the change of hardware without SysPrep before imaging on the source HD: SysPrep to move HD to another computer. It may be easier to Clean Reinstall using the retail 7 Professional key.

Thanks. You may have to explain it in more detail when and if I get a windows 8 laptop. Also the bios might be limited like my HP one is, so it may be tricky to do the stuff you described. Thanks again.