What controller did you get?
Mach3 will not work on a lot of laptops due to the power-saving chipsets not dealing out the timing consistency required for the task. That timing consistency was not guaranteed within the parallel port specification, it's not necessary for running printers.
If you have this problem, you can get stalls at unpredictable times even if the speed it turned way down. A stall as the Z-motor lifts upwards is common and very bad since, unless you have some sort of limit switch, it will misunderstand where the Z-axis is and drive the bit through the table.
Not all laptops have this problem. A USB-to-parallel-cable adapter will not fix the problem, it makes it worse. A SmoothStepper will definitely fix the problem.
I never got satisfactory results with my desktop PC running Mach3. I had to switch to SmoothStepper. |