Not Much Space on Hard Drive After Upgrading From XP to Vista

[Rack_36]

I upgraded XP to Vista and it seems like there's way too much space being taken up and I haven't even done anything yet. This is my secondary computer and it has a 40G hard drive. Theres no partitions and it says 16 GB free of 37.2 GB. When installing Vista it told me that I couldn't upgrade and that I had to do clean installation but it never asked to format the drive. I noticed a windows.old folder but I deleted it off the hard drive because of have a back up file on my external. (So just we're not confused it says 16 GB free of 37.2 GB on the C drive after I deleted that folder) I have Photoshop and 3ds max installed on there but it still seems like a lot of space is being taken up. Should I start fresh again and format the hard drive and reinstall vista?

Also it runs a lot slower now. There's 3.5 gigs ram.

Thanks ahead of time for any suggestions!!

 

[GhislainG]

It renamed the Windows folder to Windows.old and you deleted it (permanently?). Unless you manually cleaned them up, other folders like "Documents and Settings" and "Program Files" still contain everything that was there before. Doing a fresh install is recommended.

 

[Rack_36]

ok-now how do I do that because what I've tried to do so far is restart and hit F12 to boot from CD but for awhile it kept skipping that page where there's a list of setups to boot from. i.e. 1) normal 2) primary master drive 3) hard-disk drive 4) IDE CD-ROM Device etc etc...at one point i was able to get that screen and i hit option 4 to boot from CD and it told me windows downloading files and then it had the microsoft green light scroll thing at the bottom and then a vista desktop screen appeared and the graphics looked like they were in safe mode. And that's when it stopped doing anything. I can't seem to get at the screen where it gives the option to reformat disc...???

 

[GhislainG]

And that's when it stopped doing anything.

How long did you wait? If you have a 40 GB disk, you probably don't have the fastest system. On some systems it can take 10-15 minutes or more to go to the next step.

 

[Rack_36]

your right! I did it again and it allowed me to go through the set-up...was being impatient. Hopefully, I'll be fine from here on... Appreciate your help!!!!TY.