Concerning laptops with firewire I have a Dell 1420 laptop with a Ricoh firewire controller that runs very well. The controller is: 03:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05) This runs fine with AVLinux 5.0.2 and a Focusrite Saffire Pro24 firewire interface. I've run it down to 2 ms latency recording a stereo track with no xruns. Possibly, could do even better but I have not pushed it since that was adequate for my needs. The only issue I've had is that occasionally the Focusrite device is not detected meaning that /dev/fw1 is not created when I turn the Focusrite device on. This problem is fixed either by power cycling the Focusrite or rebooting. I'm not sure if this problem is hardware or software, and might possibly be related to the the Ricoh controller, but there are many other possibilities. At any rate, once the Focusrite is detected as /dev/fw1 it runs well. Of course, my experience may have limited relevance to what Dell currently offers.