Hi Osholt.
Thankyou for your reply.
What follows could be a bit long-winded.
During the ownership of my laptop (2yrs), I have not defragged, culled temp internet folders, or attempted to clean out the regisry. During this period I have, on a weekly basis, imaged the HDD giving an image size of approx 62GB (actual usable C drive space being 141GB).
As a result of a recent post, I had a look at CCleaner and a defrag prog called My Defrag. CCleaner produced huge lists of Registry issues and Temp Internet files (this being in the order 6GB!!).
So, biting the proverbial bullet, I saved current registry, did image backup, culled the registry, killed all the temp internet file, consolidated free space/defragged and rebooted. Lo and behold, everything still working.
At this point I did another HDD image b/up which produced an image file of approx 38GB. At last I have reached the underlying reason for my question: given the above, is it reasonable for the image size to have been reduced from 62GB to 38GB, due entirely to the operations as described above, or has something gone wrong.
Gasp.