So I bought this sweet XPS 1340 laptop which has some great specs and is lightweight while still providing enough power to run my PhD code ! I threw out the Vista it came with and installed Win7 ultimate on it. Now, as part of the painful process of installing the new apps I needed to make the laptop usable for work, I came to the part where MATLAB installation started.

I found out the hard way that Win7 does not like the Java version that comes with MATLAB 7.0 and hence ran the setup itself in a deprecated mode. And once the installation finished, even the splash screen would not be displayed anymore. Searching the internet yielded very little but then looking at MATLAB/work directory, I found several error logs related to Java again.

The next logical thing was to update my Java version to the latest one and I changed the “MATLAB_JAVA” environment variable to the right location. This useful nugget via Mathworks solved the issue. Of course, I spent couple of hours trying to figure this out based on several other forum postings but none of them helped. And some of these fixes were complicated too.

Amazing how often the simplest solutions solve the problems we encounter most elegantly !