Something which might be worth you looking at is a pico motherboard, they dont have a parallel port so you would need a SmoothStepper. I have one on the mill I am presently retrofitting, not run it yet on the new mill but I did use it with the SmoothStepper to run my current mill and it worked flawlessly. Heres a pic of the motherboard alongside some 150mm Mitutoyos to give an idea of size.
I like the motherboard - I take it you need to add peripherals - hang on - no you don't.
You will need a keyboard and screen - yes, everything else can come in via USB or wireless network.
Is that a power supply at the bottom - or is that seperate.
And - as an aside to the other post about Vista - is the smooth stepper the best way to go with Vista - seeing that Bill Gates will take over the world eventually.
I think the best computer is one that doesn't come with Vista.
You/we will not need Vista unless the Mach guys change the program so that you/we/us have to have Vista to run Mach but i have already mentioned that windows 7 is on the horizon so the chances of having to use Vista are nil.
As already noted on an earlier thread, everyone except Jeff Birt hates Vista. He is not going to post on this thread as he is busy getting the settings right so that he can run Mach on his Vista machine.
With Vista it is like a factory you have lots of tools and you have lots of room in the factory but instead of only using the tools you need to use you have use all the tools all of the time, checking that no other tool is doing something it doesn't have a ELUA for in doing this moving around carrying all the tools at once this will of course slow you down, also part of the equation is having to let Bill and his mates swan around through the open doors via the internet checking you have are not doing something you shouldn't.
Jim the Pico has 4 USB ports, 2 PS2 (mouse and keyboard), Lan, IDE, SATA, onboard graphics with DVI and VGA, multimedia connectors (TV out etc), Serial port (very handy for setting up my servo drives and connecting the PLC) Onboard Audio.
It can accept 1Gig DDR2 SODIMM, and has a 1Gig embedded CPU. It is unbelievably fast, I wasnt expecting anything like the performance I get, it loaded XP waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy faster than my desktop that has 4Gig DDR2 and an AMD64 X2 6000+ CPU.
You need a hard drive, I was going to get a sata 2.5inch HDD but already had a 3.5" HDD so stuck with that.
Not sure what you are thinking the power supply at the bottom is? I am using a standard PC power supply, just because I had one but you can get DC-DC power supplies for them that run from 12v or 24v also you can get small mains ones.
Hood... How mush it was your computer ??
I got the 1Gig memory from a local supplier for £20.