Shoot for at least a P200 and Windows 98 for a machine controller with DeskCNC.
Anything slower/older and Windows 98 probably won't run or there may be wierd things with drivers, displays, ports, etc. especially with laptops.
The 3D surface calculations are fairly math intensive. Plan on a faster computer if you want to scan surfaces and create 3D files and/or toolpaths to re-machine them. Same with the image processing portions of DeskCNC.
I currently do a lot of my testing on an Athlon 900. All the functions work fairly fast at that speed. However the hard drive is 30 times larger and at least 5 times faster than a P200, and it has 8 times the system RAM.
Fred Smith - IMService |