How do I tell if i’m running two operating systems on my computer?
I recently installed Windows 7 on my laptop, and since then it has been running extremely slowly and both hard drives (both around 80gb) are almost full. The laptop is fairly new with 3gb of memory, so it should be able to easily run 7. This is why i think it might still have vista left on one or both of the drives. Is there any way to find out, and if so can I safely remove the old OS?
May 28th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Look and see if you have an old_windows folder off the main drive.
May 28th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
Check your Hard Drive for a folder called old windows. Huge folder containing everything from your previous installation. If you’re sure there’s nothing in it that you need, you can delete it. But you must delete it bit by bit. Trying to delete the folder as one item will take forever
May 28th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
You can’t be actually running two operating systems at once. They’d have real clashes over, for instance, writing to the disk or screen or reading the keyboard.
If you still had Vista installed, it would be on a second partition on the hard drive, and both would show up very early in the boot-up sequence, as two alternatives on a white-on-black text screen. You could then boot into one or the other, but not both at once.
Hope that helps.
May 28th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
if you have more than one OS installed you’ll know when your PC boots up. you’ll see a screen in the boot up menu asking you to chose an OS. If you don’t see this then you don’t have another OS installed. You can’t run two OS at once but you can have more than one OS installed if you want a dual boot but that is something else
What is taking up your room is your previous install of Vista (and everything else) if you go to your c drive (or whatever drive you installed 7 onto) you will see a windows.old folder that is your previous and unusable OS. its there in case you want to go back to your previous OS or find drivers etc.
you can delete it by going to disk cleanup then just select the previous windows installation option on the checklist (you can also do a cleanup of other stuff too like internet history and temporary files to help free up more space).
That should clear up your hard disk as thats why its probably running slow
May 28th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Check your hard drives for Operating System folders.For example if you know that you have Windows 7 on D: partition then other partitions shouldn’t have any operating system folders(like Windows,Program Files,Program Data,PrefLogs).If other drives have OS folders then vista is still installed on another partition and you should format it in order to remove the OS.