Newbie here. I’ve been running my Ortur Laser Master 2 with my Lenovo G50 laptop (which I’ve upgraded several times). It works great, but I am tired of constantly moving the laptop back and forth between the laser setup and my workstation. And since sometimes laser projects take hours to complete, it ties up my computer for a long time. So I am thinking about getting a second computer dedicated just to running the laser. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on it, since it is just a convenience to avoid tying up my laptop. I am looking for thoughts on minimum requirements for a dedicated computer, in what ways I can get away being cheap and what ways I just need to spend the money. Any suggestions? Thoughts?
I bought a windows 10 pro mini PC on Amazon for around $100 and reused a monitor and wireless USB keyboard/mouse from a dead desktop PC. I later replaced the computer monitor (VGA) with a $15 thrift store HDMI TV. I run two 3D printers, a 3018 Pro CNC/laser and my brand new Ortur LM2 Pro on it (although not at the same time) and haven’t had any issues with it. If I had a chance at a redo I would buy one with more USB ports. It’s about 6" square and an inch or so thick and I stuck it on the wall behind the TV (which is also mounted to the wall). It works for me!
I have an old Dell computer that none of the grandchildren will play with because it is soooo old.
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E7500@2.93 GHzx2 with 4 Gb RAM on Linux Mint - Runs only LightBurn / K40 but it runs flawlessly. (except LB camera, but it’s a Linux problem, unfortunately)
I agree with @bionicback321 the Mini PCs make good CNC controllers. The only thing you need to make sure of is that your monitor is greater than 768 vertical resolution. LB will work with this or lower resolutions but it’s a pain…
If you really want an adventure you could look into Octoprint on a RPi with the grbl plugin… 
I stumbled across a Samsung 26" HDMI TV with a screen resolution of 1360 X 768 so it worked out, and the picture looks great. I really lucked out. I tried to use an old laptop but it couldn’t handle the graphics (it would carve and print but wouldn’t show the preview or the print in progress), so this mini PC is getting the job done.
This is just FYI to others who stumble in here. I’ve used a Win 7 eeBox EB1033 with 2GB ram and 160GB SSD for a year without issues. But, recently started crashing, running out of memory. Task manager shows 100% RAM use as it heads toward crash. And this was just burning a single image, 353k, in pass-through mode. The problem seems to have come on suddenly after no problem for a year. I’m upgrading to 4GB to see how much gets used. Also ordered 8GB since it’s cheap for this old machine. The old machine’s CPU is not a problem. Just memory. I’ve had to replace the cooling fan and lithium battery to keep it alive, but it’s not an issue. Perfect machine and comes with a wall/desk mount.
I’ve upgraded to 4GB memory and this solved my issues. Windows may have been the problem. Once upgraded to 4GB, windows immediately used 2.18GB before I even started lightburn. Then lightburn running my image only pushed memory use up to 2.5GB. I’ll continue testing with 4GB.
4GB is working fine with the EB1033. It doesn’t support any more than 4GB. This machine is 11 years old and still works fine with lightburn. But, I’ve decided to upgrade because modern mini PCs are so much more powerful. I’ve upgraded to this: KAMRUI AK1 Plus Mini PC, Intel 12th Gen N95(up to 3.4GHz) Mini Desktop Computers Windows 11 Pro, 8GB RAM/256GB M.2 SSD. Only $160 right now on amazon. Of course, lightburn runs great but also everything runs great. Gimp… Corel Draw… Chrome browser. All of these were pretty painful on the EB1033 while lightburn was fine. Now everything is fine…