This is doable but you may have to think on a system for bed-leveling. Back of the envelope computation, I estimate the depth of field of the spot system to be in the order of 15 µm. Since we only need to collect light we can relax this a bit but I would aim for 100 µm maximum in a first iteration. ...
You can try different substrate to check if it's the polyethylene that has lower signal or if alignment can still be improved. Urea is (relatively) safe to handle, cheap, and has a very clean and intense spectrum for instance.
I'm surprised about the low resolution of the paracetamol peaks despite you're using the higher quality laser.
If you take a spectrum of isopropanol do you get a sharp peak? If not it could mean that the laser is not operating at its best operating point (temperature and current)
It's common during the first alignment. Laser steering is usually the problem so check with the frosted disks that you get proper centering on each aperture.
I did not know about the link you gave. There are other online spectral database but they aren't free; reason for which I tend to stick to SDBS. About the powder, I recommend you press it but not necessarily with an hydraulic press. I just use the back of a drill bit to get something flat. It's not ...
This is unusual. Can you start the evemon.exe program first then the spectrum analyzer one? It will capture a trace of any error thrown in the debug process