Question regarding installing and updating

Ok so i currently own vanilla WoW and TBC. I haven't played for roughly 3 years and i'm looking to start playing again :)

Basically i'd like to ask if i install WoW and TBC, can i then leave it as is and come back to it another time in order to update/patch it all the way to the current version? Or do i need to install and update all in one sitting, so to speak?

I was just thinking if i could install now, i could then turn my pc on tomorrow morning and set it updating whilst i'm out all day.

Oh also what sorta GB am i looking at here? Just need to know so i can remove a couple more things if i don't have enough space ^^

Thanks for any help!|||Currently my WoW folder sits at about 25 Gb, I think, but I'm on my old laptop now and I can't check that for sure. Anyway, that's with the expansions installed, so I don't know the size of just vanilla and TBC. But to be safe, keep some free space.

You can definately install to update later. But the problem with your idea is that you cannot install everything in one go. You have to confirm every now and then when a new patch is starting to install, so keep it updating the entire day when you're out is not going to work.|||Ah damnit, i thought there might be something like that which you would have to do.

Could i perhaps install now and start patching now, but if i run out of time today pause or even stop patching altogether and then come back another day and carry on patching from where i was?

Sounds like a bit of a far fetched idea but i thought it was worth asking :)|||Since the patches are cut up in (sometimes large) chunks, rather than one big file, you can easily update the game in parts, yeah, if that's what you mean by your question.

Of course, installing from the latest expansion, you hardly have any patch time, since all the patches prior to an expansion are included then.|||Yeah that's what i meant :)

I guess i can start doing that now then, thank you very much for your help!|||With the new streaming downloader, you don't need to do it all in one chunck. You can even play with only part of the game downloaded, although you can run into some issues if you start up too early. I had to reformat my hard drive a few days ago, and let it do the first chunk overnight. When I went to play the next day, I had a new 7 GB chunk to download. I was able to play anyhow, but whenever I got a loading screen it took extra time as it had to load critical data. I also ran into some issues flying from Icecrown to Shalozar Basin. I kept hitting "walls" as it tried to load up the data for Shalozar. (I'd hit a wall, it would load the next little segment, and I'd be able to fly a bit further to the next wall. Rinse/repeat.)

You can pretty much start and stop the download as you please once the initial installation is done. (And by initial, I mean getting the launcher tool up to date, which takes practically no time at all.)

Just as a hint, try to get the downloads in overnight. With less internet traffic overall, it will download a lot faster. At least with my internet, I was getting 1MB/s overnight vs. 200 KB/s during the day.|||Ah right, well that helps immensley then!

I don't think i've got anything stopping me now :)