Bobby Don - you are not saying a lot apart from something abot a 30 yr old lettering machine.
You say you have a CNC. From that do you mean you have bought a lathe or mill fitted with gear to run as a CNC machine. If so what is it, and what is the laptop you are trying to run it with
We take it that you are trying to run this machine using Mach 3 on a laptop P.C. Is the lathe/mill already hooked up to your PC, if so, how. Is it using the LPT1 port, or a Smooth Stepper or what. Or is it a system that comes with the lathe/mill and just uses Mach 3 as the software.
As has been said some laptops are poor. This is becasue, to keep down costs, manufacturers have certain functions shared, and Mach 3 needs a substantial amount of basic processing to generate the drive pulses for a system (which have to be correct and in real time). A good laptop - such as my Toshiba - which was fully functioning - will run Mach3, and mine only finally baulked when I tried to rig up a video camera through it as well. I now use it to run an oscilloscope program, and use a tower for the lathe/mill.
The video camera (which has software in Mach 3 for positioning) works fine through my tower, showing the additional capability.
You would probably be able to run a laptop, and use a Smooth Stepper interface (through a USB port). Smooth Stepper generates many of the timing and driving pulses required by Mach 3 (as well as giving additional input and output ports) and leaves the laptop for basic control and computing functions.
Give us a bit more information, and we can advise you what to try next.