Re: Ptc Mathcad Prime 3.1 Crack
Padre Harmon
I bought the student version of Mathcad prime 8 in April 2022. I have been using it for a couple of months without any issues. Recently, the program does not open anymore. Also my Mathcad file do not open either. I tried to uninstall it and reinstall it again but it did not work. Can someone help me fix this problem please?!
I recently upgraded from Prime 8 to Prime 9, hoping for a resolution to the performance issues we've run into. I've noticed that files greater than around 3.5 MB experience a significant decrease in performance. Legacy Mathcad (15) didn't have these performance issues. I'm wondering if and when PTC is going to resolve this. I've seen a few workarounds, like vectorizing of for loops, etc, but we shouldn't have to resort to workarounds when the original Mathcad worked fine.
I suggest that you open up a case with PTC Support and submit your worksheets in the case, so they can pass those along to our R&D team. That way, PTC can use them in our performance benchmark testing as we try to improve Mathcad Prime's performance hiccups.
I used M15 heavily: I used referenced files that contained many pages of defined functions, like 50 or so. I had job files that included other job files that included these. Sometimes took a while to open, but once done was fine.
With Prime, 9 I had to rewrite everything natively in prime. That took a long time to do, I am not talking about days, I talking about months. For smaller jobs, finally got to a tolerable speed. But I cannot do large projects like I could with M15. I am forced to completely change how I work, using Prime for calculations that I input to a finite element program (I am a structural engineer, and switching to RISA) for calculations I normally did in M15.
For what I consider a small file, say 27 pages, and using include for the standard functions, a forced recalculation takes 4:30 minutes. After a portion of that time (I guess recalculating the include file) I see the recalculation of the functions in the worksheet. I can watch the results updated one by one, like 1 to 2 per second, as it progresses through the 27 pages. 40 yrs ago, I would have been impressed.
I cache the results, and when I open the file, looks good. But if I make one change or paste in a standardized calculation that uses a function defined in the include file, I am forced to recalculate, 4:30 minutes again. Once it recalculates, it's ok for continuing calculations and changes, slow but tolerable.
So for moderate and larger files, once opened and recalculated, I do not close the file, let it sit over night or whatever, so that I can continue. I use two computers, one primarily for Prime 9, and the other for drafting and RISA or other large programs. Both computers are good, that is not the problem, and its the same on both computers, one Surface and the other HP.
I understand that you first get a program to run correctly, then go back and optimize. I suspect that is what you are doing, but that it is a long process and I do not expect much improvement in the near term.
I'm not Mathcad's product manager (so I shouldn't be talking for him), but that is a fairly accurate description ("get things to run correctly [in this case, get everything crucial functionality-wise from Mathcad 15 into Mathcad Prime] then go back and optimize performance") of his thoughts.
I took a screenshot of the top bullet point for Mathcad Prime 11, which was "performance enhancements". As he was going over his thinking during the roadmap session, he verbally acknowledged problems around performance and rearchitecting Mathcad Prime to address this is the top priority for Mathcad Prime 11.
Did you already contact PTC support and do they know about your problem? If not, I guess you can't expect any improvement in the next few versions. This dos not mean that I fully believe that reporting a bug would mean an immediate fix of it, especially given that the bug you report may be quite special and not really specific.
I need to rant about how rubbish Prime is, so I am looking at the support renewals and its coming in at like 3k for my current licenses. We only use MathCAD 15 as prime's functionality is so poor compared to MathCAD 15. So what am I paying for? I sat through a 30min webinar on Prime 5.0, the only thing that they had done was add a graphing app, I had to temper my annoyance that that was the focus for the prime 5.0 release. What about the simple stuff:-
1. Why have they changed how you do subscripts! Every time I type a variable I add a subscript, this is now a two button operation. Did the developers ever open up MathCAD 15? I have been through multiple software upgrades on AutoCAD, Solidworks, Inventor etc none of them just decide to change how the user fundamental interacts with the software.
2. Why are there no formatting styles available? Prime is there to present maths in a nice consistent format so we can deliver it to our clients, did the developers forget that the output from Prime is a sheet that is often delivered as part of a client engineering pack?
3. We have hundreds of MathCAD 15 calculations that we can't convert to Prime without lots of work to re-format and sort out. This is a ridiculous place to be, no other upgrade on other software platforms has ever created so many issues.
I am sure I could keep going if I had the time, PTC have taken a market leading piece of software and rubbished it, we used to recruit based on people having used the software, this is no longer the case.
So why not forget Prime, it has such a bad reputation, it couldn't do maths when it was first released and it has continued to disappoint from release to release. Stop what you are doing PTC and look at MathCAD 15, just update that, give it tabs and nice icon colours (because that's what we all need) and sell it as MathCAD 16, I can tell you the engineering world will rejoice, and you will see customers coming back to MathCAD! Or continue with Prime and watch all you engineering clients walk away.
For PTC to not consider those that don't have the full suite of software packages is a serious error in judgement, surely even if MathCAD is intergrated with CREO the mathCAD still needs to be checked and approved and delivered as a document to a client as proof of some engineering? Am I stuck int he dark ages where I still supply evidence in pdf format to clients that some engineering was done?
I believe that if you own Mathcad 15, you can use it forever without any further payments for maintenance. Mathcad 15 works on Windows 10, so as long as you have this latest version, you should be able to end future payments and use v15 until your computer systems do not support running this version or the licensing software required. I do stay on top of each release of Prime to see what has been improved/added. My wild guess would be that Prime 10 might be close enough to consider migrating from v15? Time will tell.
SMath is an option to Mathcad...interestingly very similar in UI and functionality to Mathcad v15. It will read v15 files too, but it is not without limitations. Worth a look when you consider the cost at $0! Migrating from Mathcad v15 would require very careful considerations of all pros & cons.
I used it and it worked. However, there was a bias from fellow engineers since the to and fro between Mahcad and Creo is not that transparent and the effort to define results that directly can be used in a design is quite high. E.g. when the result of a calculation is a shaft diameter of 23.35 mm you furthermore need code that converts the result to a more conventional dimension of, say, 25 mm.
You ask a very good question. I happen to have been the chairman of the technical committee way back in the day when PTC approached us to discuss the "re-write" of Mathcad (11 years ago now). We understood the reason - modern software development tools and keeping-up with changes to the Windows OS and CPU technology. They wanted to improve the UI and make it more "MS Word-like". Bottom line was - they wanted to focus on the documentation aspect while rewriting it for a modern OS, thinking they would appeal to the larger audience of the general engineering staff member (the largest segment of their customer base). We told them they were missing the point. The core functionality is where this tool was at. To drive the point home I added that most every medium to large sized company most often have more senior engineers who write very useful "tools" in Mathcad that are then used by all other technical staff. Even though these people are fewer in number, their work is used and recognized by a much larger audience. I'll never forget the silence that overcame the room on PTC's side, and they had some high-level management there to make the pitch.
Given this, we told them they must maintain the functionality list first, then go after a modern UI. I cannot share how many times I was very firm in our requirements and how terrible the software would become if they didn't listen - all the members of the tech committee provided the same feedback. And here we are about 11 years later - hey PTC, we told you so! I know of companies that have left Mathcad for other math/programming tools because there was no path to migrate Mathcad v15 files without excessive effort, and often without any way to fully duplicate the old functionality. And there still isn't. I've also told them to never change legacy behavior. I know you would all cringe if I were to share some of the conversations I've had in the past to try to make them realize how large a mistake they would make if they continued down this path. I left participation in this technical committee a few years ago, having had enough with their lack of VOC and listening skills - not only for Mathcad but other CAE tools as well.
Having said all this, I must give kudos to PTC for the connection they have developed to Creo. For their Mathcad customer base that uses Creo as their CAD tool, this offers a significant advantage. But, this does not come without issues - like trying to incorporate old v15 tools into Creo if the functionality is missing from Prime.
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