Has anyone installed the full Prime 3.1 on MS Surf...

JoshG · ‎Sep 07, 2015

I have been using Mathcad ever since release 2.5 [tells you how old I am]. Two weeks ago my laptop crashed and I was not able to recover anything. I wanted to transfer my full Prime 3.1 license to my new Surface Pro 3, as it is becoming a very popular engineering platform. Support could not install it as the Surface does not have an Ethernet card. Support was able to only install Mathcad Express. Is anyone using the full version of Prime 3.1 on Surface Pro 3? Thanks.

StuartBruff · ‎Sep 07, 2015

Yehoshua Gilad wrote:.

I have been using Mathcad ever since release 2.5 [tells you how old I am]. Two weeks ago my laptop crashed and I was not able to recover anything. I wanted to transfer my full Prime 3.1 license to my new Surface Pro 3, as it is becoming a very popular engineering platform. Support could not install it as the Surface does not have an Ethernet card. Support was able to only install Mathcad Express. Is anyone using the full version of Prime 3.1 on Surface Pro 3? Thanks.

I believe a few people have got Mathcad Prime running on a Surface Pro 3 (Valery Ochkov maybe). As far as I'm aware, the Prime licence is tied to your primary adapter network interface MAC. Although the Surface Pro 3 might not have a wired Ethernet adapter, I suspect its wifi hardware will (I know my laptop's licence is tied to the wifi MAC ... I looked at the licence during the 30-day Prime 3.1 trial).

I can imagine a number of environments where a wifi-only lapnettopbook would be less use than a chocolate fire door ...

Stuart

ValeryOchkov · ‎Sep 07, 2015

StuartBruff wrote:

I believe a few people have got Mathcad Prime running on a Surface Pro 3 (Valery Ochkov maybe)

Stuart

I have Surface Pro with Prime 3 and am waiting for Prime 4 (one overstep Prime 3.1).

RichardJ · ‎Sep 07, 2015

Open a command prompt and type getmac. What does it say?

JoshG · ‎Sep 09, 2015

Thanks Stuart, Valery and Richard. The attached is the result of the Command prompt response:

StuartBruff · ‎Sep 09, 2015

Yehoshua Gilad wrote:84

Try requesting a licence attached to the first MAC (84-AE-2B-S7-2D-9D) (I'm not sure whether some of the 'B's and 'D's should be '8's or '0's).

Stuart

ValeryOchkov · ‎Sep 09, 2015

You can do not a photo with flash but a print screen - do you know how do it on the Surface 3 Pro?

RichardJ · ‎Sep 09, 2015

It's got a valid MAC ID, so Prime 3.1 can be licensed. Whoever you spoke to in support is incompetent.

Bear in mind that if you turn off the WiFi then the MAC ID will show as disconnected and the licensing will fail. This is really annoying, because it means that on a laptop or tablet you can't disable the WiFi when traveling and use Mathcad at the same time, but it's the way it works so we have to live with it.

StuartBruff · ‎Sep 09, 2015

Richard Jackson wrote:

It's got a valid MAC ID, so Prime 3.1 can be licensed. Whoever you spoke to in support is incompetent.

Bear in mind that if you turn off the WiFi then the MAC ID will show as disconnected and the licensing will fail. This is really annoying, because it means that on a laptop or tablet you can't disable the WiFi when traveling and use Mathcad at the same time, but it's the way it works so we have to live with it.

Out of idle curiosity (I haven't hit this particular hurdle yet), would it be possible to use a USB-to-Ethernet device (*) and have the licence associated with its MAC Address?

Stuart

Note:

(*) I mean wired Ethernet. Such devices seem reasonably cheap.

RichardJ · ‎Sep 09, 2015

would it be possible to use a USB-to-Ethernet device (*) and have the licence associated with its MAC Address?

Interesting idea. Maybe.

Werner_E · ‎Sep 10, 2015

Out of idle curiosity (I haven't hit this particular hurdle yet), would it be possible to use a USB-to-Ethernet device (*) and have the licence associated with its MAC Address?

Its possible to use such a device like a dongle with Mathcad 15 because that version would accept a license file bound to any active NIC found..

But Prime insists that the license file is bound to the one NIC which it defines as "Primary" by an algorithm unknown to me (its not the internal device order, which you could change) and chances are, that when your WiFi is turned on, the associated virtual NIC is defined as Primary, while when the Wifi is off your USB2Ethernet device is set as Primary. But you may give it a try and if you have luck, the USB device is seen as Primary in both cases (but I doubt it).

This behavior is really annoying and we had machines set up with two different license files to switch between for exactly that reason (and additionally they would have looked for a floating license if connected to our intranet).

Werner

JoshG · ‎Sep 10, 2015

When I encountered the problem, I turned to support and they assigned a case number and a support engineer to work on it. We had two 1-1.5 hour long sessions on the phone. Finally, I talked to a manager who promised to keep me in the loop as PTC solves this issue. He requested that I initiate a new product idea. I hope that one way or another it will be solved.

VladimirN · ‎Sep 11, 2015

Try to transfer the license to a new MAC address of the tablet, using an option "Reconfigure Software Licenses" on PTC's site: https://support.ptc.com/appserver/lm/rsl/reconfig.jsp

JoshG · ‎Sep 09, 2015

Thanks Richard, Valery and Stuart. I guess I will have to go back to Support and reopen the Case. Thanks again.

StuartBruff · ‎Sep 09, 2015

Hi Josh,

I've just seen your vote thread on this matter and I note that you refer to this thread. It can be a pain trying to find threads at the best of times, so I was wondering if you could add the link in your vote thread? Has anyone installed the full Prime 3.1 on MS Surface Pro 3?

Thanks,

Stuart

VladimirN · ‎Sep 10, 2015

Stuart,

I added a link to this discussion "Has anyone installed the full Prime 3.1 on MS Surface Pro 3?" in the comments to the idea "Prime 3.1 full license on Microsoft Surface Pro 3": Prime 3.1 full license on Microsoft Surface Pro 3

StuartBruff · ‎Sep 10, 2015

Спасибо, Владимир.

VladimirN · ‎Sep 10, 2015

Yehoshua,

Perhaps you are interested in using the "SMath Studio" program as a web "cloud" application on your tablet:

http://smath.info/cloud/

SMath Project

JoshG · ‎Sep 10, 2015

Thanks Vladimir.

I will try it.