I got SmoothStepper 1.2 board in the mail yesterday but I was a little bit confused after reading the manual and there are three resistors. Do I have to set up Mach3 all over again? What do I do with the resistors? Will the board work with my notebook computer?

1) The existing Mach setup should work OK 'as is' for the initial tests.

2) As the manual says:-
    3 Resistors, used for termination at the differential receivers. These resistors are provided for your
    convenience if you choose to terminate a differential encoder. The resistors may be attached to
    the wires on the screw terminals. They may also be soldered to the circuit board if you are
    qualified to do so. The resistors have a value of 121 ohms. This may or may not match the
    impedance of your cable. That is one reason they are not pre-installed.

    If you are not installing encoders just forget about the resistors.

3) If it has USB then it should work just fine with your notebook.

Make sure you switch off power management options, especially hibernation as a couple of guys have had problems with windows hibernating the USB ports and disconnecting the SS.
Hood

Good point Hood !

btw. If Mario keeps that up he could go blind.

Good point Hood !

btw. If Mario keeps that up he could go blind.

He already has

A USB port will not go into hibernation (power off) unless your whole PC does. The HW setting for the built in hubs just allows you to keep stay powered while the machine is hibernating, for instance so you can keep your mouse powered to use it to wake your machine from hibernation. If you have power management turned off then you have no worried.

Jeff, tell that to the 2 guys that were getting his SS disconnecting due to having hibernation enabled

Hood

Hood, I don't think either one of them really had that problem . One of them reported on the SmoothStepper forum that changing the USB cable fixed his problem. Most folks don't follow any type of systematic method to troubleshoot a problem. They start clicking buttons and turning knobs and hope something changes. The last thing they remember touching then become the culprit. I'm as guilty of this as any, remember that I had issues with my SS that stemmed from me writing GCode by hand for the first time in years? I too was quick to jump on the last thing that changed in the system.

My point is that USB port don't just get shut off when the PC is in operation, that is NOT in the USB spec, nor would it make any sense. That being said I have seen strange issues with some motherboard's built in USB ports (all seemed to be USB 1.1 as well), they never lost power but they would not always appear as available to the system. I fixed it with a USB 2.0 PCI card.

I would tend to agree with you regarding ports not getting shut off but I too have seen some weird and wonderful things happen with software, not just microsofts Not sure if the changing cable guy was one of them but still as long as they got sorted by whatever means thats all that matters.
 I would say  it is cerainly best to disable all power options and have it set as Always on.
Hood

OK, me and my big mouth  , I have to humbly eat crow on this subject...


I was suspicious that the USB hibernation was causing an issue at all. I thought everyone was talking about the ‘Allow this device to bring the computer out of standby’ check box. I did a bit of searching on the subject and found the following:

http://www.usbman.com/WinME%20USB%20Guide.htm (1/2 way down page)
http://www.guidenet.net/resources/usb.html (this one has the best explanation)