Laser PC

The laser cutter pc is about to die pretty soon. The chipset fan on the motherboard stopped spinning the other night so I stuck an 80mm fan in the case pointed at the chipset heatsink but I’m pretty sure that old machine is going to die on us pretty soon.

I started building up a replacement for it though. It’s a bit beefier, and has a intel q6600 quadcore, 8gb of ram, and a quadro 600, and 4x64gb ssds in raid10, a 1 tb harddrive running windows 7 ultimate 64bit. (The old machine was an Amd Athalon 5600+ dualcore, with 4gb of ram running windows 7 32bit.)

Heres whats completed:

  • All components assembled in the case.
  • Raid10 configured for the 4 ssds using the motherboard raid.
  • Fresh win7 ultimate installed using iso from microsoft and legit keys.
  • Transfered over member’s laser cutter files from old PC to new PC.
  • Setup Samba share so files are accessible via the network.

Here is what still needs to be done:

  • Install another 1TB drive and create a RAID1 array using the motherboards raid.
  • Windows updates
  • Install laserCAD software
  • Install other commonly used programs
  • Configure network for the laser pi.
  • add laserpi ip address and hostname to C:/Windows/System32/Drivers/etc/hosts incase DNS fucks with us again
  • Add chrome shortcuts to desktop for connecting to the laserpi.
  • Do a full backup of the old laser PC
  • Lock down security permissions

I’ll need help with the laserCAD program, and whatever configuration that needs to happen for it to work with the raspi and the laser cutter. Is someone able to tackle that for me?

Once that’s all done and good to go we can swap the machines and move the old laserpc onto one of the tops shelves for a couple months (just incase we need it). Then after a couple months we can pull the harddrive out of the old machine and put it in the new one so we can throw the old pc into the 3 week bin.

I’ve posted this in the #laser slack channel too.

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Hey Toma, thanks for doing this. I might have some time this weekend, would you be available to help me navigate all you’ve done?