Laptops for control???

[itsme]

Hello all,

I'm looking at building a small CNC mill and have been doing some research. I will probably end up using the 4 axis, unipolar board from Xylotex running from TurboCNC.

What I would like to know is if a laptop is suitable for running this hardware? I would obviously need to run Windows 95/98 for DOS mode and the laptop that I would use would only be a PI or PII (I don't have one yet).

The reason why I am asking this, is because I am not familiar with laptops at all and I'm not really sure if they have 'proper' parallel ports to run the Xylotex board. I have read that the newer ones generally only come with USB ports (as I said - I won't be getting a newer one...). If I were to get one without a parallel port though, would a PC card plugged into the PCMCIA slot work? This would give me a 'proper' parallel port, wouldn't it?

I have no idea what a PC card or PCMCIA slot is, but read about it here:

http://www.elandigitalsystems.com/in...ur_laptop.html

Any help on this subject would be appreciated and just to summarise: Would a laptop work to control a Xylotex board?

Thanks
Warren

[jerber]

PC card or PCMCIA is a sort of equivalent to the PCI bus on a desktop pc.
So a PC card should work. The only thing to watch out for is that some laptops
don't use 5V logic for their parallel port but 3,3V (mine does this only when not
connected to AC).