While I respect your opinion FXC I have to disagree just a bit...and as I have said before all opinions are biased (that is why I always try to state the reasoning behind my thoughts.) Bear in mind that I sell some of the stuff I talk about but I sell products I believe in, I don't just sell stuff to make a buck. I'm also in the habit of not selling folks a product if I don't think it is the best fir for their needs. I've seen that done in outfits I have worked for in the past and nobody winds up happy in the end.
This quote is just from this evening...
I'm at a standstill at the moment. I've got a $5K router and a $400 PC that don't want to speak to each other.
And I see this same thing all the time. I have a $50 seven year old PC hooked up to a SmoothStepper that works just great. I can hook that same SmoothStepper (I have done so many times) to this brand new laptop and it works EXACTLY the same. The question seems to be of 'value' as opposed to 'price'. Two or three days of anyone's time spent fighting with getting a parallel port to work on are worth a lot more than the price of a SmoothStepper (and a numb er of higher priced options as well.)
I've had some PCs that the parallel port has work fine on and others not so well, it is just pot luck.
Example of that - I've been nosing around the SmoothStepper site for the last half hour and being a noobie I'm still trying to figure out just what it is/does and whether it would help in my situation.
The SmoothStepper is an external motion control card. Mach tells the SmoothStepper what moves it would like all the steppers (or servos) make and the SmoothStepper takes care of generating all the time critical pulses in dedicated hardware. Because the time critical stuff is done in hardware it is super stable and Smooth. To the user the SmoothStepper is pretty much like having two parallel porst worth of I/O and most configuration in Mach is done the same way. There are a few things you have to set that are unique to to the SmoothStepper.
Generally it will work fine on almost any PC, you still want to avoid having programs running that can use up a lot of processor time as it will give Mach fits and stall the communication with the SmoothStepper. I always recommend a separate PC for a CNC control as there is an untold combinations of software that could give Mach fits, you just have to use common sense and only run what you need when using Mach.