very slow install of matlab 2013b on windows 8

I'm one of the site-licensed software managers at the Ohio State University. I have a user reporting that installing MATLAB 2013b took about ten hours on his Inspiron. He's running Windows 8, on an i7 with 8 gb of RAM. I tested on a much slower system, an i5 with 4 gb of RAM and the install took around a half hour. (That was on Windows 7, though. I have a Windows 8 test machine but haven't tried that yet.)

Has anyone else seen this behavior?

[Charles]

Yes, I have seen the behavior,but my system is Win7 64bit. It takes me 12 hours, totally a night. I've closed all the running software background.Who can tell me why?

Answer 1

[Wouter]

I had exactly the same problem on my new laptop with an i7 and windows 8; found out the problem was the trial version of mcafee, shutting it down reduced the remaining installation time aproximately from 100 minutes to only a few.

Answer 2

[Jan]

I have seen a similar behavior on multiple machines: Desktop with Win2k, server with Win2005, a Linux laptop, and it did not concern only the installation of Matlab, but other programs also. In all cases checking the integrity of the hard disk located the problem. But perhaps some malware send millions of spam mails from the concerned laptop. Or a strange combination of other installed software lead to a dead-lock (I've observed this for the Windows SDKs several times, but never with Matlab).

My conclusion: A large number of factors can cause this problem. Inspect the machine at first, compare the cecksum of the installation media and try it again.