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.