Mini PC for use with Mesa card.

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19 Mar 2023 01:10 #267040 by Andy123
I am moving my parallel port setup that I am running for over 10 years to the Mesa 7i96S board.
My old Dell Latitude D610 computers can't run 64bit OS, so I am looking for a cheap and portable alternative.

I tried 10-year old Atom Processor based mini-ITX board and timing looks terrible.
I tried two 10-year old Inspiron laptops with i5 processors that I have. They look good, but reading forums, laptops are not recommended.

I want to stay below $150, it needs to be small.

Will a single board Celeron PC work?
Something like this:
www.amazon.com/dp/B0BW5ZHTKY/
If not, can someone point me to another  Amazon or Microcenter PC that I can get in this range? 

Thanks

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19 Mar 2023 01:21 #267043 by tommylight
If you do have the Mesa, install LinuxCNC on one of the laptops, set everything up, leave LinuxCNC running with the Mesa attached and under LinuxCNC control (means not running a sim).
If it stays on for 2 days without dropping the link to Mesa board, use the laptop.
If it fails, yank the hard drive and install it in the other laptop, repeat above.

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19 Mar 2023 01:28 #267045 by Andy123

leave LinuxCNC running with the Mesa attached and under LinuxCNC control


Do you mean just have LinuxCNC open and Mesa card connected without running any part program?

Last week I was able to cut some parts using both laptops, but I never did a stress test. Both laptops worked just fine, but one had noisy fan spinning at full speed.

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19 Mar 2023 01:31 #267046 by tommylight
While in use and running gcode, open youtube and play something while resizing to full screen and back.
If the link odes not drop, continue using it.
Also. might need to change that fan as thermal throttling will drop the link for sure, when the fan fails.

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19 Mar 2023 01:45 #267048 by Andy123
I will leave it idle overnight running on a quiet (and newer) laptop.
Then, in the morning, I will run gcode and stress it.

Yeah, that noisy laptop needs maintenance: cleanup, new thermal paste and maybe new fan. But another one is running Ok.

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19 Mar 2023 14:54 #267085 by Andy123
Laptop passed overnight test (in idle).
I will keep it running until I have time to do stress test,

However, I would like to get an opinion on the simple Celeron based mini-PC similar to this one:
www.amazon.com/dp/B0BW5ZHTKY/

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19 Mar 2023 15:16 #267086 by 0x2102
Those no-name mini-PC are hit or miss.

I would recommend a Lenovo Tiny M710q - used from eBay.

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