I have had a Phoenix 1212 for 9 years, with a Series II controller.

This last winter I had my first problem with it and had to ship it all back to PHX for them to test and eventually replaced the rails. It was a hassle to ship it back/forth, but considering I've had to do nothing to the machine in 9 years I decided it wasn't bad.

I run Vision for Windows, as another replyer mentioned and it has been very sufficient for us. We are not a large shop but run the machine most days. I would like to try using Corel to engrave from, but haven't tackled it yet.