Don't worry about these kind of things with mainstream wallets like electrum... some people/miner are still using old bitcoin-qt clients and it is fine.
I take it you're not in IT
Keeping software (especially security, financial, and web-browsing related) up to date is very important if you don't want to get infected or hacked (and lose your funds). Running old versions of Bitcoin QT
isn't "fine", some versions had major bugs:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures.
Is there some way I can get automatically notified when a new version of the Electrum Win wallet is ready for download?
I'm not aware of any built-in way inside the Electrum software, but there is a workaround.
1. Sign up for a
GitHub account if you don't already have one.
2. Visit
gh-release-watch.com, click Login with GitHub, and authorize gh-release-watch.com to view the email address in your GitHub account.
3. In the Watch field, type in this, and then toggle the Not Watching button to Watching: spesmilo/electrum
4. Make sure a valid email address has been set.
Note: I've never actually used this service before, so I've no idea if it's reliable or not....
Should I uninstall the old wallet before installing a new version?
It's not necessary, but it doesn't hurt either.
(I will do multiple local and remote backups of my wallet before doing any installs or upgrades.)
That's always a good idea, but it also shouldn't be necessary. The only thing to be aware of is that Electrum 2.x will upgrade your wallet format. In order to downgrade to a 1.x version (not that you ever should need to), you'll either need to restore your wallet from it's seed or use a backup from before you upgrade.
Side note: if you do remote backups, be sure you've got a strong password on the wallet, or use a zero-knowledge backup provider such as SpiderOak (and a strong password with them).
