First, let me tell you why I would not even try.
You did an update to Windows 7 from Windows XP. Right? That means some of the XP files have information needed by Windows 7. And some of those are updates and I an not sure the old updates are not important. Furthermore, the total size of all the old stuff does not add up to a whole lot of disk space. Unless you have a very small drive.
Second point. Yes, you could delete the files before a certain date on the dubious supposition such are not needed. There is a date field that shows when the file was last used. Rather than delete then, try to move them to you backup device. If a file can not be moved, don't move it.
Now if later you see that file is missing, you can get it back from the backup.
This is not really my idea. Many IT professionals have learned to be very careful about deleting anything without have a backup of everything. I don't know who seed that.
Never delete anything -
Until you backup everything