Upgrade question, XP to Vista

[nikheff]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know--Vista? It's the intermediary step to installing Win 7 on my secondary PC. At any rate, during Vista install it created a "Windows.old" folder, which it said it was going to do during install. Is it safe or wise to delete this folder, and can it even be deleted? I'm guessing it's taking up a lot of hard drive space.

Help is appreciated, and thanks in advance.

[Victek123]

-{ Quote: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know--Vista? It's the intermediary step to installing Win 7 on my secondary PC. At any rate, during Vista install it created a "Windows.old" folder, which it said it was going to do during install. Is it safe or wise to delete this folder, and can it even be deleted? I'm guessing it's taking up a lot of hard drive space.

Help is appreciated, and thanks in advance." }-

I believe it's safe in the sense that Vista is not depending on it to work properly. I would wait a while, make sure everything is working properly, do a data backup, and image the disk.

Check Disk Cleanup to see if deleting the old OS files is a listed category. If so you can let the OS remove it. Otherwise I would turn off the recycle bin and delete it manually.

By the way, I always felt that Vista SP2 worked just fine. Windows 7 is an improvement, but only incrementally and mostly in the GUI.

[Daveski17]

-{ Quote: "By the way, I always felt that Vista SP2 worked just fine. Windows 7 is an improvement, but only incrementally and mostly in the GUI." }-

I'd agree with that in the main, although IMHO Vista eats a lot of RAM.

[nikheff]

-{ Quote: "I believe it's safe in the sense that Vista is not depending on it to work properly. I would wait a while, make sure everything is working properly, do a data backup, and image the disk.

Check Disk Cleanup to see if deleting the old OS files is a listed category. If so you can let the OS remove it. Otherwise I would turn off the recycle bin and delete it manually.

By the way, I always felt that Vista SP2 worked just fine. Windows 7 is an improvement, but only incrementally and mostly in the GUI." }-

Thank you for your reply. I'm leaning towards your second sentence to "wait a while....." My data is on another drive, but I will make a system image with Acronis before doing anything.

[andyman35]

-{ Quote: ".

By the way, I always felt that Vista SP2 worked just fine. Windows 7 is an improvement, but only incrementally and mostly in the GUI." }-
+1
SP2 is a huge improvement over the original Vista and I can't say I've noticed a lot of difference in performance between it and 7 personally.

[Osaban]

-{ Quote: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know--Vista? It's the intermediary step to installing Win 7 on my secondary PC. At any rate, during Vista install it created a "Windows.old" folder, which it said it was going to do during install. Is it safe or wise to delete this folder, and can it even be deleted? I'm guessing it's taking up a lot of hard drive space.

Help is appreciated, and thanks in advance." }-

It can be deleted, but I agree with Victek123 you may as well wait for a while just in case you might need something. My best machine runs on Vista64 perfectly, I've tried Win 7 for a week, and it was basically the same OS, Vista uses a bit more RAM (550 MB Win 7, 650-700 Vista, both 32 bit).