Also, you might talk to replicapro, he was going to use his notebook and his parallel port was all funky. You can run into this on a desktop too as I did but with a desktop its easy enough to install a parallel port card to fix it $25.
The number of input pins is limited, only 5 and with one dedicated to e-stop that leaves only four. I used 3 for my home switches and had to group the 3 limit switches to a single pin so now I have none for coolant or other uses. Some people install a second parallel port to gain another 5 pins, can't do that on a notebook.
Some newer notebooks only have 3.5vdc available internally, Mach2 mentions this in the doc as an issue I think.
I also just noticed that you plan to run your design software on the thing, this will be more enjoyable on a fast desktop and with a larger screen. I have a pretty good IBM notebook (T-40) loaded with 500mb of memory and my aging 2.26ghz desktop leaves it in the dust. Thats because you can put a big mother of a high performance video card in the desktop that will chomp through all that floating point graphics math and the desktop hard drives are way faster.  |