Licensing

[jrmack]

I have just paid my $240 to PTC for one year of licensing and upgrades for a year, and have wasted 3 hours of my time to get Mathcad 14 on my new machine. I need licensing codes, and believe me PTC are not making it easy, although I am totally legitimate. I dont know if PTC realizes that their security is so tight, and they are definitely not accommodating, that they make things next to impossible to get going. Their product costs me more in lost time than their product is worth.

I have Mathcad 14 and the only thing that differs it from Mathcad 13 is with Mathcad 13 you cannot read Mathcad 14, although everything is the same. At least with ACAD you can do a 'save as' to get it into a lower version, but not with Mathcad 14. That is not the PTC way of doing things.

Does anyone know of an alternate product that can do the same. Best would be a product that would transulate Mathcad into something else.

 

[jhardy1]

"Does anyone know of an alternate product that can do the same. Best would be a product that would translate Mathcad into something else. "

Take a look at SMath Studio:

http://en.smath.info/forum/

It's a sort of Mathcad-clone - it's not a powerful as Mathcad, but it does 75% - 90% of what most users are looking for, and you can't argue with the price. (It's free, but donations are welcome!)

It will read and write SOME (very basic) Mathcad 14 workbooks, but I'll be honest - it hasn't worked for me on any "real" workbooks that I have tried to import. The main problem seems to be handling of units (which has just been added to SMath Studio). Workbooks without units may have a better chance of converting, but that would defeat much of the purpose of using Mathcad / SMath Studio for me.

Well worth a look, and you can decide if it will do what you want / need.

Hope this helps!

 

[PNachtwey]

I have stopped upgrading at Mathcad 13 and am in the process of switching to wxMaxima. wxMaxima uses text based entry but prints out the equations in a pretty way. It can also output text which can be cut and pasted into another program but it isn't in C format.

wxMaxima is superior to Mathcad at symbolic processing.
wxMaxima is free too.

Peter Nachtwey
Delta Computer Systems

http://www.deltamotion.com

 

[IRstuff]

Depending on what you need done, Mathcad 11, or earlier, or Studyworks, may work perfectly fine. Studyworks does not do programming, and its symbolic processing is limited, but for mnay applications, what it does is quite adequate. Studyworks can be ought on EBay for less than $20.

While SMath is a vry good start, I find its user interface to be much more awkward than Mathcad's, and since I don't do much programming, Studyworks would actually suffice, although I still have my trusty Mathcad 11 running.

TTFN

FAQ731-376