The old laptop & mail were better. Now problem with Google Mail contacts

[UTUSN]

So, I have fairly much resigned myself to the problem with Auto Refresh that the new laptop continues to have on a daily basis (previous threads here). For years with at least two previous machines I used the free Outlook Express, which I now will say was *FANTASTIC* and completely hassle-free.

So Express has been killed off, and with my shift to the new laptop I went whole hog to shift to Google Mail. Right away it was clunky and inflexible, but I thought I would get used to it. Fine. For the first several months, everything else besides the clunkiness/inflexibility was working, but now in the past couple of weeks a few of my Contacts have disappeared. I have added them back individually/manually multiple times and done a "Restore Contacts" that brings them back, but the Restore and the Adding are only good for a day's session or so and the next day back to their being missing.

Besides that, the Google Mail in the android phone doesn't have a Contacts LIST, you have to type the first letter on the chance that the Contact is there somewhere.

I dipped into Google Mail Help and the problems cited are slightly twisted away from mine, and the "solutions" are just useless. This is only adding to the machine's general bugginess - besides the Auto Restart, there are problems with hypersensitivity of the keyboard where keystrokes are shortcuts to disappearing screens and gone text and text size changes.