Old PC`s and Mach3

[magicniner]

It's lucky that we're not stuck with XP and that Mach3 works perfectly well on Windows 7, which finds good drivers for a huge range of hardware, new and old.

- Nick

[cropwell]

Hi Nick,

The PC I use for CNC is an old (ish) machine running XP. I have stripped out everything in the system that I don't need, Games, Networking etc and have disabled devices in the BIOS so that drivers it doesn't need are not loaded. As a result, the system is very stable and loads in <20 seconds as it has a SSD in it.

I tried the PP card on a Win7 machine with little success but did not pursue the matter as it was not mission critical.

It was fun getting into Mach3 and I am impressed with the range of customisation possible.

I am not a fan of Win7 and its successors, but that is because my understanding of the OS, as complexity increases, lessens. I was happy with Win95 - I understood it more (I must just be a reactionary old fart ).


Cheers

Rob

[magicniner]

(I must just be a reactionary old fart ).

Rob,
I don't think that's the case, everyone is best sticking with what they're happy with.

Windows 7 simply gives access to several later generations of PC hardware,
Regards,
Nick

[Clive S]

It also depends if it is 32bit or 64 bit syatem

[magicniner]

It also depends if it is 32bit or 64 bit syatem

Given that parallel ports are not supported under 64 bit then external motion controllers would be the only option in 64 bit, Mach3 still works under 64 bit though

- Nick

[Robin Hewitt]

Takes me back...

C:\>debug
-d40:0
0040:0000 F8 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 - 78 03 00 00 00 0B 02
-q
C:\>

Meaning one serial port at 03f8h and one parallel port at 0378h so if you wrote to 0378h your data would be on the pins in microseconds if not faster.

Of course you were supposed to access it via the BIOS, not that that would slow it down much.

It only really goes tits up when writing to 0378h causes an interrupt that will join the queue to sort the mess out at some nebulous time in the future.

[Tenson]

I also don't like Windows 8 and 10. My wife just got a Win 8 'Surface Pro' from work. I can't make heads nor tails of it on first use. I'm very comfortable with win 7 and predecessors.

[i2i]

this p/port computer problem is not down to a specific model or make of computer. I have 8 dell computers that are exactly the same, four of them work, four of them don't. They all have the same setup and were completely wiped before installation of xp.

[magicniner]

It's about the parallel port spec, not PC model, Dell were known for swapping things on boards during the life of a model, if you got a replacement board under warranty it might or might not even support the OS install on the existing HDD.

[cropwell]

I never trusted Dell, they were chucked together as cheaply as possible in my opinion. Most of my machines I built myself, it's not rocket surgery.