I still have the issue where clicking the toolpath window on will kill my job, stall my mototrs and generally cause pandemonium around my machine. i use 5 - 15mb files with heaps of path so Mach pulsing and drawing the path is not happening for me.

If i invest in a SmoothStepper will this take the load of the processor enough for me to run with toopath display on?

My mill pc is a dell gx620. 3.2ghz HT with 1gb drr800, XP Pro minimal install.

I am not sure if it will help as it is likely to be due to your graphics card rather than CPU, Dell often are not that great in that area (if integrated). Turning off the Toolpath will more than likely help but obviously you wont see anything in the toolpath window.
 If it is an integrated card have a look in the BIOS and see if you can increase the shared memory allocated to the card.
Hood

its a  pcie nv8200 with 512mb of ram. I think ii covered this in another thread. Most jewellers seem to have the same issue because of the density of our paths and the fact that they get rotated. I don't recall whom, but someone said that it was a known issue and would be addressed in the next revision of mach. This happens on rotary toolpaths mostly but will happen on indexed work if they happen to be rotated by the 4th axis and toolpath display is on as well. I setup  customers mill on a quadcore 3ghz with 4gb of ram and a nvida 9800gtx 768mb of ram. same issues. definately not a hardware problem.

I want to use video probing to but i dare not try use it along with toolpath display on this setup. will stall me for sure. was kinda hoping that by taking the load of the cpu with smoothstepper i could broaden my usage. So im back to asking if the smooth stepper will reduce cpu load, or do i hang around for the next revision rather than investing in new hardware?

Ken, you bought a smooth stepper dude.. speak up.!

Ok then it is due to the way Mach does the toolpath and as you suspect it should be sorted in the next revision of Mach,  graphics have been seperated and improved drastically. In the testing I have done with Rev4  it is certainly much more friendly to graphics.
 As said above however it is unlikely that the SmoothStepper will help you in this situation.

Hood

If you want to attach some code I can open it with Rev4 and see if its better.
Hood

ok gimme ten. supper time

ok here you go.

this is the hawks job i posted a while bback. this one stalled my machine when A tried to turn because i was teaching my wife to use mach and she forgot to turn viewport off

Seems much better with Rev4, had a few issues trying to get the toolpath to view but went to a different version as I had forgotten I had a test version of the test version loaded
This is with the SmoothStepper and I was able to rotate the toolpath as the machine was running, it sounded fine but cant say for definite as I did not measure and verify doesnt seem to work with the SS.
 I tried again with version 027 of Mach and as soon as I clicked on the toolpath window the SmoothStepper crapped out and a restart was needed.

Cant test with the parallel port, dont have one .

Hood

i get same behaviour with parallel port. if toolpath is on when a rotation happens or if i turn it on while a cut is happening then everything goes pear shaped.

thanks for your help. will wait itll next revision is finalised then.

Hey Chris,
I don't seem to have that problem since I installed the SS. I was having that issue before, so my best guess is that it did free something up?
Running an old Dell 2.8 ghz, 768mb RAM, and a vid card with only 128mb RAM.
Video window hasn't crashed on me yet either...Dunno what it did, but it definitely helped something since the install.  I'll load your path and see what happens.