How to use GraphPad programs under Windows Vista or Windows 7

Prism 5, Prism 6, and Vista or Windows 7

Prism 5 and Prism 6 both run under Vista or Windows 7, as well as Windows XP. Prism 5 has a slightly different appearance under Vista, but no features are specific to Vista.

Prism 4

Prism 4 is obsolete and we do not support it under modern Windows operating systems.

InStat and StatMate
InStat 3 and StatMate 2 both run fine under Vista and  Windows 7.

We have not tested earlier versions of Prism, InStat or StatMate with Vista, and don't plan to. 

64 bit Windows
Current versions of GraphPad programs all run fine under 64 bit versions of Windows (as far as we know) but don't take advantage of the 64 bit chip.

Prism 5.03 and InStat 3.1  include some fixes to work under 64 bit Windows, so be sure to update.

We had one report of someone not being able to install InStat from a CD under 64 bit Vista. This work around solved the problem:  Instead of letting the autostart work with the CD, open the CD manually in Windows Explorer and launch install.exe to start the installer (instead of setup.exe, a short program also on the CD that does nothing but launch install.exe).

One customer told us that InStat 3.06 did not run under 64 bit Vista until he set compatibility mode to fool  InStat into thinking it was running under Windows XP. To set this, find the instat.exe file, right click, choose properties, and then set compatibility mode. That may also be necessary for StatMate. We have also been told that StatMate 1 does not work under 64 bit Windows, but StatMate 2 does.

We had one user who tried to install InStat 3.1 under Vista 64-bit and got the following error message:

"Failed to expand shelf folder constant userappdata"

The problem appeared to that the InStat installer shell could not find the Application Data folder of the current user. This situation may have been caused by an incorrect or broken Windows registry entry. This problem was fixed by clicking on the Fix-it-For-Me option in this Microsoft article:

  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/886549

If you are installing from a CD (rather than a downloaded installer), the autostart may not work correctly.  Instead of letting the autostart work with the CD, open the CD manually in Windows Explorer and launch the installer that begins with 'Install'. The autostart system launches setup.exe, a short program also on the CD that does nothing but launch the larger install program. With 32 bit Windows, this works perfectly. But with 64 bit Windows, that tiny setup.exe program simply won't run.