Upgrading LabVIEW

[daniel_dsouza]

Hi CD,

I was just wondering what is the easiest way to upgrade LabVIEW. Every year, we get a new version of LabVIEW to install. Since the classmate gets reimaged every year, we don't have to worry about updating...

However this is the first year we installed LabVIEW on a computer other than the classmate.

So my real question is, when we get the LabVIEW installer USB key (or whatever), will we have to uninstall the existing LabVIEW, or will there be an upgrade option?

Thanks,
Daniel D.

[Jeff Pahl]

There is no "upgrade" option. You can just install the new version, and it will co-exist with the older version. Whatever you install last should become the default installation. I think I have 5 different versions on my work PC.

That said, I believe the license on the 2012 season software expires about a week after the 2013 kickoff, so you may as well uninstall the old version.

[Fifthparallel]

Typically, our team has a laptop with all of the various versions installed on top of each other until the licenses run out then just uninstall whatever expires (usually happens right around the beginning of January each year, haha).

Note that uninstalling LV 2011/FRC 2012 is easiest with going into Uninstall Programs and then finding the thing named National Instruments something or other, and run the uninstaller. You'll see a list over on the left, and Shift-Click everything in there, then click Remove. Have a mouse with a scrollwheel on hand, really eases up on you.

Uninstall takes roughly 1.5-2 hours on a beefy gaming laptop (i7-740 @ 1.7 -> 2.9 ghz, 16GiB ddr3 ram @ 1333 mhz, 7200 rpm 500 GiB hdd) so it may be something you want to let run overnight or through dinner. Make sure your laptop/desktop/Coffeemaker with an ARMv7 chip doesn't slow down hard disks/shutoff/go to sleep after XYZ amount of time, as that can halt and disturb the uninstall process.