In the words of Lewis Carroll's Alice: "Curiouser and curiouser....". I've stripped the XP install to the bone, so there are only about 15-20 processes running, and none consume any significant amount of CPU. When Mach is running, the idle process never seems to drop below 50% of CPU usage, and Mach never goes above 49%.
Today, it seems to be back to cutting perfect circles. Go figure!
But, today I also found when doing rapids, I'd get periodic "clunks" from the drives, which usually indicates erratic timing in the step pulses to the servos. This was really severe on first boot fo the PC, so I rebooted, and it was much better, but still there. The "clunks" occurred at very regular intervals, roughly once/second. Disabling all limit switch inputs and E-Stop input reduced the severity of the clunks considerably. Reducing rapid speed from 75IPM to 60IPM completely eliminated them, even with the E-stop and limits all enabled. What is that all about?
Regards,
Ray L.