i have set up my rockcliff hobby cnc and i an running mach3 from my laptop (toshiba) with a pcmcia parallel port card and it works. i got the card from ebay they do cost $100.00. the card is plug and play so once put in the lpt/
com show up in the xp hardware ports as lpt3. change this to lpt1 and thats it. parallel port is set to 378 from the start.i hope this helps with the laptop parallel port question.