Running Vista, safe to delete "windows.old" file?

P

Parker

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 18, 2006
Messages
418
Running out of primary disk space. Deleting this folder would free up close to 20 Gig.
 
Since you upgraded- it allows you to go back to XP.

That's the purpose.

As said- if you are happy, delete it. You could stick it on some DVDs if you want a backup, I guess. If you are happy with Vista though, not much use keeping it around...
 
zacdl said:
Since you upgraded- it allows you to go back to XP. That's the purpose.
Click to expand...


Not true. The WINDOWS.OLD folder will be created during a Custom Clean install also, if you point the installation at a partition where a Windows installation already exists.

The 'purpose' of the behaviour is to 'quarantine' the older installation and retain it. There is no such thing as an 'Uninstall Vista' option - you need to Clean Install XP to revert the rig. Quaranting the previous installation files allows the user to recover stuff afterwards. The 'purpose' of it is to provide a 'non-destructive' Clean Install procedure.

People frequently misunderstand that their files might be amongst the jumble of the 'Documents and Settings' folder, for example.



To the topic poster - you can safely remove the folder whenever you are sure that there's nothing in it you need to recover. You don't 'delete' the thing. Instead you use the Disk Cleanup tool and check the 'Previous Windows Installation' option for removal.
 
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