Should I need keep in my PC previous versions of Matlab?

Greetings everybody, I am currently working with R2024b but have all previous versions back to R2019b still installed in my PC. This is consuming a lot of space in my HD and I believe it is slowing down my computer.

Do I really need to keep these previous versions installed or is it possible to delete them to release some space in the HD?

Thanking you in advance!

[Torsten]

It's not necessary to keep old versions, but it could be safe to additionally keep the last well-working release available.

Further arguments to consider are listed here:

https://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/744272-older-versions-of-matlab

[JUAN ANTONIO CABEZA LÓPEZ DE TAMAYO]

Thanks for your kind answer!

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

"Do I really need to keep these previous versions installed or is it possible to delete them to release some space in the HD?"

You only the need the version (or versions) that you want to use. Uninstall the rest if you do not use them.

[JUAN ANTONIO CABEZA LÓPEZ DE TAMAYO]

Dear Stephen, thank you for your very kind and prompt response!

Answer 2

[John D'Errico]

Some of us keep older releases, just to answer a question about an older release, testing out code in the old release.

I do tend to keep the most recent past release no matter what, just in case a significant problem might arise in the most recent one. Never seen that happen yet, but if I don't need to worry about the space, it costs me nothing. And its more likely that I would prefer to use the newer release as there are always bug fixes in each release.

Does it slow down your computer? Well, no, at least not until your drive starts to get seriously full.

So yes, you can trash the old releases. Make sure that you don't trash any of your files in the process. Some users tend to use the MATLAB directories to store their own files, a bad idea for several reasons.

Answer 3

[Image Analyst]

I have had to keep old version of MATLAB three times. The first two times it was because my camera drivers did not work with the latest release. So I had to wait for the next MATLAB release or updated software from the camera manufacturer before it could work with the newest version.

The last time I had to keep using an old version it was because R2025a has a huge memory leak with the camera -- camera worked but it kept eating up memory up to over 100 GB until MATLAB finally crashed -- so I had to stick with R2024b. Supposedly that bug has been fixed in r2025b but I have yet to try it so I'm still using r2024b.

If you verify that all your software still works with the new version, then you don't need the old software and can uninstall it. If you find out later something didn't work, you can still download old installers from the web site and install an old version.

I doubt that simply having an old version sitting on your hard drive taking up space would slow down your CPU or drive I/O speed. Sometimes computations might have changed and on occasion we see people posting times for runs on a new version and an old version and saying the new version is slower. But I can't say anything about that. But I doubt just having some disk space storing an old version of MATLAB, or any other software you don't use a lot, would slow down your CPU.

[John D'Errico]

Yeah, it makes little sense that extra releases would slow down a PC, UNLESS, their drive is around 99% full because of those extra releases. Now there will be disk fragmenting issues, and virtual memory will be a probem.

[JUAN ANTONIO CABEZA LÓPEZ DE TAMAYO]

Noted with thanks, I appreciate your kind support to solve this issue!

[Walter Roberson]

Well, there is always the possibility that you are using a harddrive that uses SMR recording, and the drive might be more than half full, so the drive might slow down when random other things are recorded that happen to be into adjacent tracks to where MATLAB is stored.

SMR recording is not a great idea, but it is significantly less expensive.

[JUAN ANTONIO CABEZA LÓPEZ DE TAMAYO]

Dear Walter thanks for your kind advice!