While it's all very well while playing and learning the machine with this controller I'm not sure I'd want to be using it for any real work where time is money or mission-critical work using expense sheets of material because drip feeding is going to bite you sooner or later.!
It doesn't take many dropouts and wrecked sheets at £60-100 a pop and that's not to mention wasted time to recover the costs of an upgrade. Then when you factor in the potential upgrade in performance I'm not sure I'd be wasting any effort struggling to learn this controller or its ancient software.!

Biting the bullet and paying for upgrading sooner rather than later will pay for its self within a very short time if you have the work for it.