It's been a long few days. I did the repair install and it didn't make any difference to my woes. I was so stuck I had to phone Dell ! They ran a hardware check (hmm) but there were no problems which left them with the software problem which of course I had to pay for and of course my problem wasn't the cheap one which only costs £20 to rectify.
They did a repair-install too (yes I told them everything I had done) . They accessed my Laptop and 'took it over' and the first thing the did was download CCleaner !! They also downloaded Malwarebytes . They ran a diagnostics check too which showed nothing.
I was on the phone for nearly 6 hours over two days. His final try was a debug and complete re-install of windows. This worked and the laptop is fine now. Meantime he kept trying to flog me an external hard-drive !
I don't know, he did some strange things to the set-up of windows like disabling the updates and saying my anti-virus would download windows updates - eh ? Also, he seemed to turn everything off he thought would cause conflicts.....I mean stuff I wasn't so sure about. He also said he found a lot of cookies and items in the 'start-up' which would make a difference to the speed of the laptop.
At one stage he suggested my internet speed was slow. However, he did fix the problem but I'm not sure how much flannel he gave me but I suppose it doesn't matter now.
Thank yoiu to everyone here who helped and I'm sorry I couldn't fix it without asking Dell.
