Old PC`s and Mach3

[Steel]

I have been building my desktop router and have been screaming with frustration trying to get my steppers to run smoothly. I have three XP PC boxes all working and cleaned of trash proggrammes. All three give ragged pulses to my steppers? A chance conversation with Angeltec revealed that around 50% of his old XP PC`s will not run Mach3 successfully? Following that I tried my system with a PC already running my old Mach3 router and "bobs your uncle" every thing worked perfectly?

So is this a common problem?? If so are these other three PC`s able to be adapted in some way.

I have a ibm t42 laptop running xp and i use a paralell port to the driver board. I use a cpu program called rightmark CPU clock utility, without it i get judder on the steppers with it i get smooth running, its a free utility google it

[magicniner]

I have a ibm t42 laptop running xp and i use a paralell port to the driver board. I use a cpu program called rightmark CPU clock utility, without it i get judder on the steppers with it i get smooth running, its a free utility google it

That utility effectively over rides the laptop power management's propensity to slow down the CPU whenever possible to reduce power consumption, another common laptop problem is a parallel port voltage which proves marginal for driving external logic.
You have a laptop which can work with Mach3 through the parallel port, many will not and that's the reason laptops were not recommended or supported.