Thanks rmix, that's very helpful - I am planning to install on a laptop and have been getting mixed messages from around the internet. I would be interested in hearing others' success/short-coming with Widows 8 and Mathcad 3.
You may consider searching the main Mathcad forum here [URL unfurl="true"]http://communities.ptc.com/community/mathcad[/url] for "Prime" and "Windows 8" but I don't remember having read there about serious problems with the two.
Are you new to Mathcad or do you already use Mathcad 15 (or below). I am asking as I think that Prime3 still isn't good enough to change from MC15 to. And MC15 seems to run pretty well with Win8 - at least for me as I use Prime just for playing around to get used to, not for serious work. But I remember some useres in the community reported of problems with MC15 and Win8 (especially with 3D plots, I think). Of course if you are new to MC it may make sense to use Prime as it will be (unfortunately) the future of Mathcad and it won't make much sense learning use the old interface.
There is nothing inherently different about W8, other than the GUI, so I would not expect any fundamental issues with running any Mathcad application under W8. In fact, I'm running Studyworks 2002 on a W8 ultrabook right now, without any issues.
As for Prime, the jury is still out and will be out until probably MP5. Only now are they re-introducing ancient features as "new" in MP3, such as templates. Prime is a bit more "designed" in the sense that there is a feature set that is "designed" into the GUI, like solve blocks. Mathcad had been more or less ad hoc-ly added to over years as they developed more features. There were a couple attempts over the years to try and instill some design discipline, but those generally failed spectacularly.
TTFN
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Thanks for your responses. The last version I used was Mathcad 7. It's been a while but I remember it as a good program so I wanted to get back into it. From what I've read, I think MP3 will do most of what I need. I was going to start with MP3 rather than M15 for the reason rmix22 mentioned - it's the future of the program . . .
Ah, M7, back in the days when MC might actually fit on a bunch of floppies... ;-) If you're doing ordinary calculations, MP3 should be more than adequate. I've never needed anything more challenging than what's available in MP3, other than templates and the like.
TTFN
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If you're upgrading from MC7 (and haven't used it for many years), you'll probably find Mathcad Prime will do all you want.
Those of us migrating from MC 13 /14 / 15 are still waiting for MC Prime to replace all of the features they took out from MC15 - and I suspect it'll take a couple of years for PTC to fill all the gaps.
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