I have a laser I bought in 2011 it is a re-badged redsail with a Ruida controller. The control panel buttons are working intermittently and I am having to run to the pc to start it every part. It is an old controller. I plan to upgrade the controller and software. I currently use Corel X4 to design on and have to run it through a virtual machine on my Windows 10 machine. Kind of a pain as X4 won't run on Windows 10. I plan to switch to Illustrator for design work as that will allow me to run in Windows 10.
My questions are,
1. What would be a good controller to replace this with?
2. Can all my files saved as X4 be opened in a new version of illustrator without any problems? I would do the discount upgrade of corel but that would leave me on the virtual machine running Windows 7.

Thanks in advance for any help.