Mach 3 Crashing My PC on Startup.

Hi all.

I have been running Mach 3 (fully licensed) for about 2 years or so on a 20 year old Pentium 4, 2GHz Windows XP, 8GB DDR 333GHZ system with an ATI Rage 256MB graphic card. It has it's moments but has been generally good. Every now and then this system freezes up for no reason. Luckily enough it has not happened during a cut.

I figured that it was time to semi retire this to being a backup system and get something newer, but not 'too' new. I just purchased a HP 6300 with a Core i5 quad core 3.2GHZ processor, Windows 7 Pro - 32bit with 8GB DDR3 - 1333GHz RAM. 250gb HDD, NVIDIA K620 Quadro 2GB graphic card and I installed a parallel port that I saw people had used successfully with Mach 3.

I think I made a mistake by fully updating windows before loading on Mach 3 and supporting software because Mach 3 crashes the computer when I try to load it up. I get the Arcsoft screen then it reboots into the safe mode screen. QCAD and Sheetcam work fine.

I've done some searching and saw that some updates cause crashed like this so I looked and none of those updates are on my system. I also saw that some updates cause the parallel card to not work and shuts Mach 3 out. I opened up the command window and took care of that.

I have wiped and reinstalled Mach 3 a couple of times now to no avail. Do I just revert windows back to it's original state or just keep uninstalling blocks of updates until it works? I already removed all of the latest ones.

Any help / ideas are most appreciated.

Hi,
some of the latest MS Windows 7 updates caused that behavior. MachMotion made a published a Mach3 bugfix for it, to my knowledge the only
change to Mach3 in seven years. There are a few posts (sticky) on the Mach3 General Discussion page.

Craig

Thank you. I did a bunch of searches and the newest results were from 2018.

Anyway, I just did as I said and deleted updates in blocks of 4 and the last set did the trick. Now though my settings have not saved. I placed the newest xml file in the Mach 3 file?? well my other computer is still hooked up so I could either try the 'newest' version or I could simply take a pic of all the port / pins settings and do it manually.

Well, I wish things were always this easy. I just went and took a fresh xml backup file from my current working computer, even though the one I used to try get this up and running was only a few months old, and it's worked.

The other one must have been corrupt??

Anyway, I'm sure I'm not going to be able to just plug this in and go...........It's never that easy!!

Is your CNC computer connected to the Internet? If not, then you don't need all the latest updates. A fresh installation of Windows 7 (32-bit) plus Service Pack 1 is all you need.

i,
OR....do yourself a favor and get Mach4...light years ahead of Mach3 and no BS with Windows updates....randomly corrupted XML files.

Craig

Do yourself a REAL favour and throw out the parallel port: instead buy an ESS and get the latest driver.

For reference: I am running W7 (32 bit) on a Dell dual processor of many years antiquity, with an ESS (and 2 off MB-02 BoBs), and life is great. NO (as in ZERO) internet connection; I use sneaker-net in the form of an 8GB USB key.

Cheers
Roger

TBF. Mach3 is old software that was desigmed for simple operating systems like XP.
I've never had issues with it on XP via PP.
I couldn't get it stable with Win7.
Win7 and onwards is just bloated.

Moved on to UCCNC and UC300eth.

A few days ago i had this problem and i simply solved with this solution:

Go into command prompt with administrator rights and paste and add the below registers.

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session Manager\Memory Management" /v FeatureSettingsOverride /t REG_DWORD /d 3 /f

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session Manager\Memory Management" /v FeatureSettingsOverrideMask /t REG_DWORD /d 3 /f

Restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

(You do not have to change MinVmVersionForCpuBasedMitigations.)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...erabilities-in


You can follow along with these instructions:

1.) Go to your start menu and start typing 'cmd'. The command prompt (or cmd) option should appear right away. Right click and select 'Run as Administrator.' You need to be using an administrator account as well.

2.) Once you've opened the command prompt and see 'Administrator' along the top, you're almost there. Copy the first line that starts with 'reg add'. Right click in the command window and select 'Paste'. Then hit your 'enter' key.

3.) Repeat the previous step with the second line of code: copy and then paste into the command prompt window on the next line. Hit 'enter'.

4.) You should received a successful message after each line. If you see an error message regarding your access being denied, you should double check that you are logged in to an account with administrative privileges and that you are running the command prompt as an administrator (see step 1).

5.) Restart your computer.

6.) Open Mach3 and get to work.

7.) Happy CNCing!

All the credits go to Bryanna in mach support site.
https://www.machsupport.com/forum/in...?topic=38269.0

Those register changes are to handle Spectre and Meltdown. OK, but somehow I do not think they are relevant here.

I am aware that there may be problems with some parallel port interfaces, because Mach3 assumed that the port was built with an old MOSTEK chip - which was 'industry standard' for a long time. It had some very strange internals! But afaik that chip is no longer available, and the emulators only really work for driving printers.

For reference: I am running W7 (32 bit) on a Dell dual processor of many years antiquity, with an ESS (and 2 off MB-02 BoBs), and life is great. NO (as in ZERO) internet connection; I use sneaker-net in the form of an 8GB USB key.
And I am doing limited semi-production machining with this rig.

Cheers
Roger

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nbzinhoxxd

A few days ago i had this problem and i simply solved with this solution:

Go into command prompt with administrator rights and paste and add the below registers.

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session Manager\Memory Management" /v FeatureSettingsOverride /t REG_DWORD /d 3 /f

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session Manager\Memory Management" /v FeatureSettingsOverrideMask /t REG_DWORD /d 3 /f

Restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

(You do not have to change MinVmVersionForCpuBasedMitigations.)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...erabilities-in


You can follow along with these instructions:

1.) Go to your start menu and start typing 'cmd'. The command prompt (or cmd) option should appear right away. Right click and select 'Run as Administrator.' You need to be using an administrator account as well.

2.) Once you've opened the command prompt and see 'Administrator' along the top, you're almost there. Copy the first line that starts with 'reg add'. Right click in the command window and select 'Paste'. Then hit your 'enter' key.

3.) Repeat the previous step with the second line of code: copy and then paste into the command prompt window on the next line. Hit 'enter'.

4.) You should received a successful message after each line. If you see an error message regarding your access being denied, you should double check that you are logged in to an account with administrative privileges and that you are running the command prompt as an administrator (see step 1).

5.) Restart your computer.

6.) Open Mach3 and get to work.

7.) Happy CNCing!

All the credits go to Bryanna in mach support site.
https://www.machsupport.com/forum/in...?topic=38269.0

---

I don't understand any of that but it worked! My new re-install after adding your lines on a Win7 went from immediately crashing to running...almost. Here's the weird part: I have a CNCEST 6040 which has been running, as well as could be expected for a cheapo setup, for 2 1/2 years on a different laptop, and just got a CNCEST 6090. I always load the 6040 with the Mach3 Loader. It will run either machine, so both controllers and hardware are OK. The new laptop won't run the 6040. When loading via Loader, it runs XYZ but no spindle turning (which will manually). When loading via the MachMill, the spindle runs but no XYZ. Any ideas?