so as I begin my journey into CNC I am working through many ups and downs....

I now have both a lathe and mill however I also struck a PC disaster with the mill.

Lathe is a Denford Starturn 8 unconverted running Denford DOS software - likely upgrade in the near future

Mill is a Denford Triac already converted to Mach3 with a dual parallel port connection to XP PC.

having got the Mill up and running almost immediately the PC died on me so I am looking for options

I have a Panasonic toughbook that I intent to be dedicated to CNC and a licenced copy of Mach3 on it

it seems pointless if not impossible to try to add parallel ports to the laptop

as I have detail of the parallel pinouts for the mill and a working machine profile in Mach3 it seems like this should be a fairly simple task - or that's my theory anyway..... time will tell

as both machines use the same electronics I was planning to use the conversion on the mill as a template to convert the lathe which should make that process easier when the time comes.

but given the old PC has died on me it looks like I need to move up the process of adding a motion controller to the mill rather than just using it as is.

looking around the UC300ETH seems like a good card for my purposes and has a Mach3 plugin as well as the option to use UCCNC which many seem to like.

I also find myself having the crazy thought that given the number of inputs, outputs and axis on the UC300 could I connect both machines with different machine profiles for each? I don't see myself with any need to run both machines together so while this is a bit of a mad idea it may not be impossible.

any advice for a newb? any other or better options?