Welcome to the Community Greg ! Most EZ-Robot users have Windows 7 and that is my preference , I have a new laptop with win 8 as well but I'm not a fan of the changes they have made. Many are just using a around a dual core 2 ghz Cpu and 2 -8 gb ram. I have tried Both slower and faster PC combinations and I only notice limitations of the PC when I max out all the digital pin usage or use more than one board / project at a time on the same PC. Just for reference I will note what I use.

My laptop - for a laptop that you would dedicate to just run your project a cheap one will do l. I went to Best Buy and bought a Dell D15 series laptop.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/inspiron-15-6-refurbished-laptop-4gb-memory-500gb-hard-drive/1560252.p?id=1219056635185&skuId=1560252&st=dell%20ir15&cp=1&lp=6

This is the laptop I bought but I got mine new then upgraded to 8gb ram. Running ezb it does well in a project but it doesn't handle anything 3D well. It's slow when running ez bits section of ARC.

My desktop however runs everything like a champ so I can use it for editing 3D print files , using the Ez bits library builder and running more than one EZB

Desktop Asus M4a88T BOARD AMD 270u Dual core 2ghz cpu 8 gb ram 7500 rpm HD NVidia GTX 560ti graphics card.

My system have a good graphics card frees up lots of resources to do whatever I want. If you build a pc just for robots use remember to have plenty of ram and video card.

Holy crap Windows 98? Can it even connect to the internet? LOL:D

Greg, I'm running an older dual core laptop running a new and clean install of Win 7. It seems to be running 3 EZB's just fine. However I dabbled a bit with adding a camera for movement tracking and was having some trouble but I'm not sure it was the fault of the laptop, Win 7 or me. Probably me.

I'd suggest that you get the newest, fastest, strongest computer you can afford. Make sure it's running no less then Win 7 with as much Ram as you can afford and a good video card. You'll never regret extra headroom.

According to Microsoft Ram (memory): Win 7 memory limit is 4 GB on X86, 192 GB on X64 Win 8memory limit is 4 GB on X86, 152 GB on X64

I'm not sure how the amount of Cores comes into play with ARC. I am under the impression that a program has to be coded to take advantage of using different cores. Windows handles how to allocate resources and it may lump ARC onto the same core as most of your other programs leaving the other cores lightly used. In my Visual Pinball Cabinet I have a Quad core computer (running win XP) and I use a stand alone program called SetAffinity ll. At Win startup that allocates my visual pinball programs to the cores I want. That way I am sure that program is running a a core all by it's self. I cant seem to find the web site so it may not be available anymore. However here is a forum thread that has a lot of good ideas and links to good programs for assigning or limiting cpu cores: They seem to like a program called Prio:

forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=356909

Hope this helps, Dave

Thanks for all the input - now I have a direction to go in.

Happy building to all! Greg

P.S. B9Greg's current system does not require internet access.

Just to be pedantic but an x86 system is limited to just over 3Gb of RAM (system dependant), you can fit 12Gb in and it'll only have 3.3-3.5Gb usable.

Different versions of Windows allow different amounts of RAM (all x64 based); Windows 7 Ultimate 192GB Windows 7 Enterprise 192GB Windows 7 Professional 192GB Windows 7 Home Premium 16GB Windows 7 Home Basic 8GB Windows 8 128GB Windows 8 Pro 512GB