Easy Servo Drive?

[Dragonfly]

I think that one should use a dedicated PC (I do so) for the motion controller - turned off all visual candy staff, no anti virus, no active power saving and screen saver. In two words - everything which might take processing power or interfere with the time critical pulse generation is turned off. Using Win XP, Mach3 special driver is written for it primarily.
Laptops have built into their hardware means to save power, CPU throttling and so on. On top of that if the CPU (Intel processors) heats to a near critical temperature it has an internal protection by skipping clock cycles to cool themselves down. Had a problem with this and took me a lot of time until I discovered that the CPU cooler has detached from the holder on one side and the CPU was getting hot.

[Tenson]

Jazz Thanks so much for the kind offer! Can you link to something that explains what an external motion controller does differently than my current parallel port to break-out-board setup? Looking at the smooth stepper site it basically looks like a USB to parallel port but I assume it must be more than that because such a thing is very cheap and small. Would I still use my break-out-board?

If it means anything I get a 'Time In Int.' on Mach3 sitting at about 4 when idle and jumping between 4 and 11 when running. Does that occasional jump mean something bad?

https://youtu.be/0hVQXoq_eqI

DeagonFly, the laptop is dedicated to CNC and runs WinXP. I chose it because it has a built in parallel port which I assumed would be better than a USB or PCMCIA adaptor.