[linux-audio-user] Best(saving *time* and some money) linux souncard for a laptop

[MarC]

Hello, I'm considering buying a laptop to work(soft 
developing/maths:matlab,maple) but in the future I'll buy also a 
soundcard and use it as a realtime FX box (for guitar/keyboards,15-30ms 
of latency are enough and I don't need MIDI, I'll use softsynths).
1) What soundcard do you recommend me? For me it's not a problem to work 
a little bit more to win enough money but I don't want to lose my time 
finding and testing unstable or non supported drivers. Also consider 
that for audio work, most of my time I will be running M$ windows (linux 
audio isn't good enough for me) even if for experimental sounds Linux 
may be great.
2) I won't buy it now so what kind of things should the laptop have to 
have the possibility of buying an external card afterwards? PCMCIA, 
Firewire, USB2? Any chipsets/CPUs are preferable?

I know this has been discussed many times here but since there's a lot 
of movement in USB/Firewire in the last days, I think that it would good 
to take another picture of the state of the art.
Thank you very much in advance,
MarC