Reinstalling should I install 8.5 and 8.6 or just 8.6?

[RTSLVU]

A recent hard drive crash has forced me to reinstall everything from scratch.

So far I have installed:

LV 5.11 because still I have to maintain a huge LV 5.11 code base

LV 8.21 because 8.5 and higher will not open 5.11 code directly so I have to open and save it in 8.21 first.

I have 8.5 and 8.6 here.

Should I install them both or just skip 8.5 all together?

If the consensus is to skip 8.5 does anyone know where I can download the 8.6 installation disks?

I am not high enough in the corporate food chain to warrant a DVD drive in my computer.

My original 8.6 installation was from the pre-release email I received and that email died with my hard drive.

[Bob_Schor]

The "easy" answer is if you don't have a DVD, remember that 8.6 is not distributed on CDs, but on DVDs.  The other consideration is compatibility -- if you don't need to "share" with 8.5 users, there's little downside in using the latest version (except "backward compatibility").  I'm still mostly using 8.5 because many of my colleagues/students don't yet have 8.6 ...  Since you have 8.5, go with it and upgrade later (when your DVD is installed).

Bob Schor

[Hillman]

HI,

Thanks for the post!

I would just like to add you can download the evaluation version of LabVIEW 8.6 from ni.com and then as long as you have a valid serial number it will license to the full one. Obviously, this won't include the toolkits and modules from the DevSuite installer.

Also one way around this issue of not having a DVD driver, is to burn DVD images to a server, and then download them to your PC.

Kind Regards,  

[Michelle_N]

Don't forget you can choose to save your 8.6 VI in a previous version of LV.