Thanks for ALL your advice and input, its been a big help.

After reading and viewing videos on your recommended UC products, I'm thinking of purchasing the UC100 usb controller and Mach3 software. Judging by some of the articles I've read,, they appear to be very simple to set-up and run quite smoothly together, so I'm hoping they should be fine running on my windows 7 64bit system.

Q) Does the UC100 contoller have any preference to USB 2 or USB 3 connectivity ?
Q) Does the US400 Ethernet version have any advantages over the UC 100 ?

Any advice welcome and thanks again for your time and responses.