Newbie CNC Computer Hardware Quest

[Lee Roberts]

Hi S,

Welcome to the forum and great first post!

I'm not sure re: XP and SP2, what I would say though is that mach3 should run quite happily on a machine with a fresh install of XP, if you dont plan to put the machine online, I would suggest you shouldn't need SP2, the security fix's it introduces and so on. You may need to download the odd software drive for things like the sound card but that's as easy as going to the motherboard manufacturer website and looking for the said drivers.

I'm confident Windows 7 would install and support the parallel port but again if it didn't, see my reply above for a solution to obtaining the drivers.

If it was me i would turn the machine on, check the parallel port is enabled in the bios then boot into windows and see where you stand with windows update, though win7 is a much better operating system in my opinion, so actually I would just install that to be honest.

I would be even more confident about getting proper driver support from the operating system to start with then as well.

Mach3 actually installs it's own parallel port driver when you first install it, so I think your going to be just fine, so at this point, i would say just pick an OS and go for it.

Letting us know how you get on of course :)

.Me