After clicking through the installer and clicking on install at the end, the set window seems to get stuck. I’ve waited for 15 min or so each time with no luck. Tried installing older versions, restarting my computer, no dice. I end up needing to go to task manager to kill the window because the cancel a ‘x’ buttons don’t work. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Hey,
I’ve been stuck with the exact same problem and honestly, it’s been driving me a bit crazy. Cursor just won’t install on my system — no matter what I try.
Once I launch the installer and click “Install”, the window freezes at “Preparing Setup” and nothing ever happens. No CPU activity, no GPU spike — it just sits there. Can’t click cancel, can’t close the window, and I always end up killing it through Task Manager.
At this point I’ve tried:
- Multiple versions: 0.50.4, 0.49.6, 0.48.0, and even 0.46.0 — none of them worked
- Running as admin
- Disabling Defender completely
- Launching from clean folders like
D:\InstallCursor - Using flags like
--no-sandbox,--disable-gpu-sandboxfrom PowerShell - Extracting the installer with 7-Zip (didn’t find any usable files)
- Trying to install via
msiexecjust to see if it would trigger anything (it didn’t — gave error 2203) - Verified all optional Windows components, just in case
I even went through blog posts and GitHub issues trying to find someone who got past this — no luck so far.
I’m on Windows 11 Pro 24H2, everything up to date, RTX 3060 with latest drivers, no corporate antivirus or weird restrictions.
Would be super helpful if the team could confirm if there’s at least one version out there that does install cleanly. Or maybe a plain ZIP version we can run directly? Anything to help bypass this installer wall.
Really want to try Cursor in my workflow, but I can’t even get past the gate.
Just wanted to share a solution that worked for me after running into the same installer freeze issue on Windows.
Every time I tried to install Cursor — regardless of the version — the installer would hang at the “Preparing Setup” screen. No progress, no error messages, and no resource usage. The window couldn’t be closed either, and I always had to kill it through Task Manager.
After trying all the usual things like running as administrator, disabling Defender, using command line flags, and attempting older versions from GitHub (including 0.46.0, 0.48.0, 0.49.6, and 0.50.4), nothing worked. I even tried extracting the setup file with 7-Zip to look for a portable structure, but the newer builds don’t contain any usable executables or extractable content.
What finally did the trick was downloading a much older version — specifically version 0.43.0 — from an alternative source:
I ran the installer as admin, and this time it installed correctly within seconds. No freeze, no issues.
After launching Cursor, I was prompted to update the app. The first update brought it to a version somewhere around 0.47, and a second update brought it up to the current latest version. Both updates installed smoothly and the app restarted automatically each time.
To confirm the final version, I ran this PowerShell command:
(Get-Item "C:\Users\$env:USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Cursor\Cursor.exe").VersionInfo.ProductVersion
Mine ended up at version 0.49.6.
It seems that the older versions use a simpler, more compatible installer that avoids the issues caused by the newer ones. Once installed, Cursor’s internal update system takes care of everything else without problems.
Hopefully this helps someone else facing the same installation block. Let me know if I can clarify any of the steps.