title: Do all prior vestiges of VS need to be uninstalled before installing VS 2012 for Windows 8?
body: <p>Four hours on the appropriate msdn forum (Visual Studio Developer Center > Visual Studio vNext Forums >  Visual Studio Setup and Installation) and not a bite, so I'll try here:</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to install Visual Studio for Windows 8 on my laptop, on which I just installed the Windows 8 OS RC.</p>
  
  <p>I already had Visual Studio 2012 Pro RC (for Windows 7) installed.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to install VS for w8, but after 10-12 hours of installation (it seemed stuck on the "Blend" cycle), I canceled out and decided to uninstall both versions of VS 2012 (Pro for pre-W8 and Express for W8) before proceeding again with installation of VS Express 2012 for Windows 8.</p>
  
  <p>Control Panel showed both versions of VS 2012 in my list of installed apps, although the W8 version hadn't finished installing (I did try to run it, to see if it would - it wouldn't).</p>
  
  <p>Anyway, I uninstalled VS 2012 for W8 and am in the process of uninstalling VS 2012 Pro; is this to be expected (that the previous version first needs to be uninstalled before the new one will install)?</p>
  
  <p>Note: Control Panel showed both versions of VS 2012 as having been installed on 7/23 (yesterday), whereas I really installed VS 2012 Pro a month or so ago...is this just because some of its components were updated, or...???</p>
  
  <p>BTW, I also still have VS C# Express installed - do I need to uninstall that, too, before installing VS Express 2012 for W8?</p>
  
  <p>Also, I downloaded the W8 OS, burned it to a DVD, created a (100 GB) partition so I could have W7 &amp; W8 simultaneously, but my laptop did not offer a "boot from optical" option from the BIOS settings screen, so rather than installing W8 to my new partition, I had to install W8 from the DVD (no option was given to select a partition on which to install it), thus overwriting Windows 7 in order to install the Windows 8 OS.</p>