I just want to chime in, because the forum closed the previous anti-Mathcad/PTC post, the one regarding incompatibility between M'Cad 13 and the 64-bit Vista OS (Re: thread552-193152).
I'm a decades old Mathcad user that thought it was the best thing sinces sliced bread and now feel raped after spending my very own hundreds of dollars on the 13 release only to find out that it won't work on my recently upgraded laptop, a 4 GB RAM, 64-bit Vista laptop beast (believe it or not, it was less than $700, after sales tax, in Tenn no less!!).
That explains the hard sell from PTC, spamming me about getting the 14 release for yet another couple of hundred dollars (at last call). PTC is the devil, they deserve all the class action lawsuits that could possibly rain on them, and this from a laissez faire libertarian, don't get me wrong on that account. Half the pages I try to access on their website require some kind of service agreement.
Hey, I guess I should've stuck to ripping off my employer's copy. This is nothing but a classic case of "no good deed goes unpunished". I'll be a sonovagun if I'm going to give PTC another penny. My choices now are, (1) attempt to use Mathcad on my comatose Toshiba Satellite laptop (only wakes up when it feels like it), or (2) give my new HP Pavilion an enema and replace the Vista OS with XP. I'm not sure how the dual processor would respond to that, but it would sure be a foolish "fix" anyhow.
Roberto Sanabria