I am reaching out to other owners of Felder Format 4 Profit CNC router owners!

I have a bit of a saga going on.

It started with my PC in the console refusing to talk to the CNC board, and was quickly follwed by the blue screen of death. Oh dear, I thought, that's going to be a problem, as the PC is so old and runs XP.

Talked to Felder - zero help. Only offer was to replace the pc for....


£7500!!!!


Obviously, I was more than a bit shocked. I went to work looking inside the PC, replaced the memory stick (no change) and then pulled the PCI Ethernet card.

Hooray! The PC booted up. But didn't want to talk to the CNC. RTX server wasn't happy, needs to be configured with the new card.Beyond my capabilities really.

Spoke to Felder. Still no help to fix the PC. Had a call booked in with tech support this morning. Didn't happen. Couldn't get the PC to connect to the internet anyway, I think windows explorer 6 and teamviewer 5 don't work any more. So spoke to Felder again, this time at my wits end. I am very busy at the mo and have a lot to process through my machine. I may lose a contract worth over £40k.

Instead, I got their MD who kindly explained that they do support the PC, I should just buy a replacement from them. I am unsure about this as they clearly can't fix the one I have, am I going to have to replace the PC each time something goes wrong with it?

Plus, there's no telling me how long it would take etc. and in the meantime, work is piling up.

Has anyone else experienced Felder's service department?

In the meantime, Felder in Austria have told me that the replacement PC would be running windows 7. Perhaps that's why it should cost £7500, as it's such a cutting edge machine. NASA have probably bought all the stocks of them for the recent Moon launch, hence supply restrictions driving the price up (lols)

And I have no date for a machine to arrive.

So, in short, if you have a felder CNC running a windows XP PC, then this is what may await you. Good luck. And if anyone knows how to set up RTX server, please get in touch.

FYI my machine is 12 years old. I was hoping to get more like 25 years out of it. But this issue could have happened any time since 2014 when XP stopped being supported. At which point it was 5 years old.
I would have thought £70,000 would buy me a machine with a longer lifespan than that.

Many thanks!