do i need anything specific compared to the old electrum wallet? do i reinstall the new version directly? does the old one get overwritten? do i need to save anything?
As the above said you can uninstall it and install the latest version but you don't need to uninstall them if you want to use the latest version just install it and it would upgrade automatically to the latest version while keeping all of the synced data intact, including your wallet file so that you don't need to recreate your wallet.