Total memory

steveseven said:

ok, lets try this again.

when i delete a file, it still takes up a small amount of freespace, not enough to be a problem but it still is there. but if i delete a lot of high MB/GB files, will the "leftovers" from those files take away from the overall freespace on my comp?

No, not at all. You have a wrong view of the concept. Example:
You write a 10MB file on the disk. That takes 10MB off the freespace and the system makes an entry into the MFT (Master File Table) that this is a live file.
Now you delete this file. The system deletes nothing (the file remains as is) but it makes an entry in the MFT saying that this file is dead and that the space is available. The 10MBs will be added to the freespace.
That's why programs like Recuva are able to retrieve files that have been previously deleted - all the data is there unless you have written new files to disk and that space (which is tagged as free now) has been overwritten. If you make a disk defrag, all the files on disk are shoved around to fill all those free spaces (as the MFT says) and then the data of your 10MB file is overwritten. Is that understandable?

PS: I just see that 2 other people said the same thing - but in less words.

thank you tepid and everyone, glad thats over with haha

now, i can delete folders within the .old folder, thats not a prob right?

I think so. You may have to take ownership. I never had a windows.old. I always do fresh installs. But why don't you save what you need and delete the whole thing. There are a lot of files in there that have no meaning for you.

whs said:

One other thing you can do is eleiminate the hibernation file on disk (assuming that you do not use hibernation - really no need for that). That saves you 2GB and you exercise your newly aquired cmd skills.
Open cmd amd type (or paste)

does win7 use hibernate? whats the major differences between hibernate and sleep?

whs said:

I think so. You may have to take ownership. I never had a windows.old. I always do fresh installs. But why don't you save what you need and delete the whole thing. There are a lot of files in there that have no meaning for you.

i assume u mean you think that it wont be a prob. so i can delete folders within the .old folder, but then do all that extra stuff to get rid of the actual .old folder? and take ownership of what?

Just try to delete a folder. If it works, we need not go any further. If it does not, we'll explore the options such as taking ownership. There is no harm done deleting folders that you don't need. Nothing in windows.old is needed to run your current system. They only generate it for your convenience so that you can recover your own stuff.
I would even try to move the whole thing to an external disk. Then you have time to recover from it what you need.

i can delete folders so i guess its not a prob. do i need to do that whole command process still? i wish i thought about putting everything on a disk before I deleted stuff, that would have saved time if i needed to back to xp or get its settings and stuff

I am sure there are some files which will you trouble if you want to delete them - mainly system files that came from XP. Using cmd is fun and you will learn something. What's wrong with that. But also try to move the whole thing to the external disk (I assume you have one).
Another suggestion is that you make a seperate partition for your data. Let me know whether that would interest you.