Advantech PPC174T is it a good candidate?

I already have this unit on my lathe. The specs can be found here www.datasheetlib.com/datasheet/1216538/p...re-te_advantech.html Mine has a P4 2.6 with a G of RAM, 80G HD
It solved all of my stalling issues when running Mach3 (due to a computer death and its replacement's performance was not acceptable), However Mach and its lack of support in Turn is frustrating me to no end.
I have always seen people running Linux on YouTube and such but have no experience with it at all.
I was able to configure a bootable USB and install the Debian Wheezy 2.7. (what appears to be the latest version at the time of this writing). I installed it into the above computer thinking that I removed Windows during the install. If windows is there I dont know how to access it or see any indication of it being there.
It doesnt pass the latency test or should I say it presents seemingly incredible numbers in the base thread of the HAL test (250820). I see there are ways to improve this possibly however the methods are nowhere similar to what I know of in Windows and that was limited to use. I have tinkered in BIOS only to create the inability to boot, changing the settings back resolved the booting.
I have installed nothing additional as in software (in case something else is needed?) I tried reading as much as I could, watched videos etc. Apparently everyone else gets it
Being a wonderful industrial computer and touchscreen I would like to use it. Is there a possibility? I understand I will flail around for quite a while trying to learn this system but stubborn is in my blood.

Being a rather expensive piece of equipment I doubt anyone here will have any experience with it, to be able to tell you if it will or won't work. My gut feeling is that it should be possible to make it work though.

What were some of the settings you tinkered with in the bios? If it has hyperthreading, turn it off, also turn off every powersaving feature you can find.

Todd, Thanks for the response.

I agree on the price of the equipment however in my case it was an EBay find. $195 to my door, wiped HD NOS with the plastic film still on. Offerings for industrial computers and or touchscreens are there, you just have to keep your eyes on it. I just got a mini itx fanless for 60 bucks. I first installed XP Pro sp3 and ran Mach again. The ability to generate steps is exceptionally better than the Dell it was replacing. Though I am not sure why. By doing searches you find it is a very vague science as both communities are stumped as to why some boards work and others dont. I have even read that a Windows update creates the issues for Mach, Who knows?

In regards to the BIOS, this machine has a system a little different than most off the shelf PC's I have seen. The options are just worded different most likely. I am not experienced enough to know the differences (yet). However trying to disable some features creates boot failures. I am getting pretty good at getting back from those Any tips would be appreciated. I am not concerned about messing with the BIOS if given the information.

A quick google of the manual, shows that it should use an Intel 845GV chipset, and the Linuxcnc latency wiki shows some systems using that chipset with decent latency test results. So it is probably worth messing about with to try to find a setting that works for you. But none of that is a guarantee it will work, good luck.

Thanks for the research. I am now trying to get back to my BIOS settings which seem unavailable ATM. It keeps going to the Grub regardless of if I push the del key or not (del is the BIOS key for this PC). From my very limited understanding it appears Linux uses much more command line use if that is what it is called. Never mind the BIOS issue. I figured that out.