Not a good idea with a servo it is a good way to blow out the final drive section of the drive. To touch off is one thing but to drive it hard into the stop is another. I am afraid that most don't know the difference.

(;-) TP

Don't think it will do my drive much harm TP
It specifically allows you to do so,  see pic., just set a low current value whilst homing
Hood

Ok I am back.

Over the last few weeks I obtained an Advantech PPC 174T, combo 17" touchscreen and 2.66ghz processor with 2g ram (brand new with the plastic film still on). It came with the hard drive wiped clean, no OS. Ebay is a wonderful thing! Less than 300 to my door.

I loaded a copy of Xp Pro SP3, Mach 3 and that is it. Well I did DL and install the drivers from Pentouch and Advantech.

 I connected thru the PP to my MX3660. Tuned it to 45khz and cant stall my steppers at 200 ipm! They do stall at the 280 ipm range with an accel value above 70. This is at 8250 steps per unit (inch). This is on the machine in operation. I was stalling before at 60-70 ipm on the machine or not.  

I am not using a motion control board such as the ESS or Pokeys. In fact I am getting speeds higher than the ESS with the old computer. No ticking of the steppers etc. Quite odd.

I could not disable the APCI when installing XP no matter what I tried. F5 and or F7 had no effect on the installation. Actually F5 gave me an option of standard install but selecting it created an endless boot loop.  Whether I did the change in BIOS or thru device manager.

I didnt do any of the optimization steps except disabling updates and eliminating the remote assistance. All seems to be working great. I will not be going online with this PC. Also the driver test is a little better looking (less spikes) but nowhere near a smooth line.  Baffled but happy.