Hi guys. It finally happened and our old computer has cratered and I need to get back up and running. I am not a guru with this and have done some searching but just can seem to find the right answers.  I thought if I just got a 25 pin to usb conversion and fired up the old laptop everything would be ok but seems I was way wrong.

Our plasma system is a precision cutting system
Has the stand alone motion controller
Hypertherm torch height control

The original computer will fire up long enough for me to pull all of the mach 3 information and license so i transferred to flash drive and loaded on to a laptop we had running xp. No serial port on laptop so I purchased an adapter and then read the adapters will not run with the mach 3 system as would a printer.

Is my best bet to find an old tower with a serial port and xp and load my mach 3 to it or is their more to it than this. Im really struggling any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Parallel port, not serial port.
Either get an older PC, or buy an ethernet smoothstepper, or UC400ETH motion controller. I wouldn't recommend a USB controller with plasma.

Thank you Ger21 for the quick reply. I am looking into those options now.

I've had a number of computers go down.  I get on Tiger Direct and look for a Windows 7 32 bit PC with the parallel port.  Doesn't need to be XP, it can be Win 7, but my understanding is it has to be 32 bit not 64 bit.

Hi,
I''ve used a board like this with the one PP built-in and another PCI card PP for several years. More recently using the same platform to run
Mach4 and ESS. The dual core Atom has VERY modest computing power and its on-chip graphics are poor yet its done a great job for me and
reliably as you might guess from being new.
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~D2550HN

If I were buying again I would buy something with a bit more grunt, the Atom can be slow to load and generate the toolpath for large files,(ordinary
milling files are fine and the Atom actually runs the machine fine large or small files).
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=76#JNF9F-H61
has a parallel header rather than a DB25.

Craig