Mathcad License

[Joeboy]

Has anyone else experienced this?

I have been using Mathcad 15 on a daily basis for years. I used it yesterday. Today when I clicked on it I got a popup saying the hostid did not match that on my computer. I looked at the host ID in the license and sure enough it did not match that in my laptop (ipconfig/all). How could this have occurred and how can it be fixed ? Is it possible that automatic windows updatse could have caused this ?

[Linenbrink]

I had the same problem. PTC does not seem to grasp the fact that a windows machine can have multiple physical addresses. If the PTC license module finds the one it was registered to first everything's fine, if it finds one of the others it thinks the software is not licesensed. You have to go into the PTC website and transfer your license to the the other physcial address.

I don't know why PTC seems incapable of fixing this. Seems it would be a simple matter to scan for all physical addresses to decide if the software is licensed to that machine rather than stopping at the first one. Or even better yet,just issue a hardware key so you can run one license on any machin with MathCAD installed.

[Joeboy · Accepted solution]

thanks for the information, I thought I might be losing it

[RichardJ]

Fixing it is not quite so simple, especially on a lap-top. You have a MAC ID for the wireless connection and another MAC ID for the wired connection. If you disable the wireless and/or wired connections those IDs disappear. So you could have no IDs, either one of two different IDs, or two IDs. I set up Mathcad with the wireless ID, and that is the only way the licensing will work. It's very annoying, because when I am traveling I would prefer to disable the wireless adapter for security reasons. But then I can't run Mathcad

Using the MAC ID for licensing was a bad very choice in the first place, and the only way to "fix" it would be to completely change the way the licensing works.

[Joeboy]

Seems to me that PTC looks for the most complicated, least intuitive way of doing everything except charging fees.

[Werner_E]

I think the behaviour of Mathcad 15 is a little bit different.

While installing Mathcad choses one of the adapters in your machine as being "primary" and binds the license to its MAC.

When you run Mathcad it searches all adapters and if it finds the one the license was bound to its happy.

This is quite different to Mathcad Prime - here it looks at the "primary" adapter only and so it can happen that it refuses to work even if the adapter the license is bound to is present and active.

So if Mathcad 15 refuses to work it means that the adapter the license is bound to is not present (or not activated). That could mean that you have deactivated the wireless adapter or have disconnected a USB-UMTS adapter which was there and active at installation time and had the honour of being chosen to be "primary".

I agree that chosing the MAC adress (and calling it CPU ID!!) was not the best idea, but things really got worse with Prime. We sure will run into problems when Prime gets grown up with version 5 or 6 and we are urged to use it instead of MC15.