can tell you that I had far too many issues with a Toshiba Satelite.
I could not get it to work much at all.
I then tried an old IMB R40 and once I got rid of all the OEM IBM bloatware and set the Bios up corretly, then it worked fine.
I am running three of those on machines now and swap them out with spares when an issue does arise. So far I have lost a fan on one, a mother board battery and a hard drive on another. I use those for parts now. I have been using them a couple years now. They are readily available on Ebay for around $100 or less.
As to what happened to yours, I can't really say. It doesn't sound associated with the usual reason laptops are not recommended. Those would be timing issues in the PC and not outputting enough voltage on the parallel port.