Many questions about installing LV

[Cat]

I'm attempting to install LabVIEW 2010 64-bit. Questions:

1) Installing LV takes way over an hour as does installing the device drivers. Is this normal? I'm thinking not, and am more than willing to blame my anti-virus software that I unfortunately can't turn off...

2) For the many installs I did (see sob story below) it was asking where I wanted LabVIEW to go and where I wanted other NI components to go. Sometimes the default was "C:\Program Files\...". Sometimes it was "C:\Program Files (x86)\..." Which one of these is "right"? Or does it even matter?

3) I searched in vain for a 64-bit device driver download on the NI site. If it's really there, can someone point me in the right direction? If not, is it okay to use the 32-bit driver disk that came in the mail?

Long, sad, sob story:

I was tearing my hair out yesterday trying to install LV2010. I need to recompile my 32 bit code with 64 bit LabVIEW and see if that helps with performance issues I've been having. I had downloaded and installed SP1 a few days ago and then gotten the disks in the mail. Being the anal-retentive type, I figured I should reinstall from the disks. So I uninstalled, then reinstalled.

So I run my newly installed LV and when the splash screen comes up it says it's running the 32-bit version. NI sent me 32-bit LabVIEW. Grrrrr. When you install the 64-bit version, it says that in the menubar. The 32-bit version is silent on the matter. So uninstall and reinstall the original downloaded 64-bit version. Another 3 hours shot...

But even tho I left it at the default "C:\Program Files\...", a bunch of NI stuff is still installed in "C:\Program Files (x86)\..." Which is what triggered this post. I would like all the NI stuff to be in one spot, but that may just be my anal-retentive nature again.

[pylb]

Hi,

NI DVDs contain only the 32 bit version of LabVIEW. To get the 64 bit version, you have to download it here: http://digital.ni.com/src.nsf/home?OpenForm.

FYI that is why the path was ...Program Files (x86) not ...Program Files.

As for the driver, I am not sure if the device drivers DVD contain both or not.

As for the installation taking forever, this is quite normal...

hope that helps

[hooovahh]

Programs that are 32 bit but in a 64 bit environment will be in the Program Files (x86) folder. So while LabVIEW.exe may be a 64 bit program (and so installed in "Program Files") Some other programs that NI installs may not be 64 bit. So if MAX was still 32 bit (not sure if it is or not) then it would be installed in the (x86) folder while LabVIEW it self would be in the normal "Program Files" folder.

[Cat]

Programs that are 32 bit but in a 64 bit environment will be in the Program Files (x86) folder.

That makes sense. The install prompts are just a little misleading. Thanks!

As for the installation taking forever, this is quite normal...

And here I was fully prepared to not blame NI.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

1) Installing LV takes way over an hour as does installing the device drivers. Is this normal? I'm thinking not, and am more than willing to blame my anti-virus software that I unfortunately can't turn off...

On my computer it took more like 8 hours for the LabVIEW 2010 installation (full developer suite installation with most Toolkits included), another 6 hours for the device driver installation and then again 6 hours for the SP1 installation and after that another 4 hours or so for the LabVIEW Embedded for ARM Evaluation

This is on a "very old" Dual Core 2.2GHz Notebook with Win XP SP3 but has just about any LabVIEW version and accompagning tools installed since LabVIEW 6.0 and quite a bit of other software so it may be that the MSI database overload is quite a lot of the problem for this.

My new upcoming computer should be a bit faster and I plan to use separate VM installations for the different older LabVIEW versions, and depending on the speed maybe for all. On the current machine with VMWare the performance is quite bad for running any LabVIEW installation inside a VM.