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Upgrading to a new PC for ProLase 10:

There are two kinds of laser marking systems analog and digital.  Most, if not all, modern marking systems are digital, but older systems may be analog.  Typically analog markers with ProLase use two PCI cards on the PC bus, a DAC card (PCIM-DDA06/16) and a Counter/Timer card (PCI-CTR05). If that’s what you have you need two things in your PC: (1) You must install a 32 bit version of Windows 10 (there are only 32 bit kernel mode drivers for analog systems). You can install Window’s 32 bit on 64 bit PCs. (2) You must make sure your PC motherboard has an 8253/8254 interval timer chip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8253). This chip has been on PCs since the beginning, but in the last couple of years, some motherboards do not include this chip. ProLase analog control uses this chip to control the speed of the galvos, and it must be present. Since analog systems are no longer made, and motherboards with PCI slots and the timer chip are harder to find, ProLase 10 is probably the last generation of ProLase to support analog markers. Here is a modern motherboard some of our OEMs are using to upgrade older ProLase machines. It is made by Gigabyte (model # GA-h81m-hd3), has 2 PCI slots, the timer chip, can use a modern (up to i7) intel processor and is priced around $150 (without memory or CPU).
If you have the newer digital type system it will have one card on the PC bus called an RTC card. This card is from SCANLAB and can be any version between RTC2 and RTC6. If your system is digital you can use either 32 bit or 64 bit Windows 10. Digital systems do not need the motherboard to have the 8254 chip, since the RTC card preforms all real-time galvo control, and has its own internal timers.