Ideal setup for Gravograph LS900 to work best?

Hi All,
I'm new here.
I don't know much about CNC or Lasers beyond what the supplier training session taught me.
The college department I work in (Art & Design) has a Gravograph LS900 which was new around a year ago.
We have been using it with Adobe illustrator and to be honest it has never been very satisfactory with various issues like it crashing/stalling mid print occasionally, sometimes not cutting the full design and general buggyness with the print driver.
I'm convinced that such an expensive allegedly high quality machine must be able to work better than this. At times it takes repeated attempts to get it to an accept a file it can work from.
As such I'm trying to find out what works for other users of the Gravograph LS machines.
Ideas going through my head include:

USB port setup problems? How should it be configured?
What software is best? Adobe illustrator appears to have a lot excess features which aren't necessary for laser cutting and engraving with this machine and has definitely caused problems. Could it also be not working very well with the print driver as well?
Laptop vs Desktop? Could using a desktop make things more stable?
Whilst I haven't used it much personally everyone says the print driver seems to be very clunky and buggy but I guess this is something we just have to work with.
Any suggestions much appreciated.
thanks :)