What do you all think of those dual core Dell Inspiron e1705 notebooks? It looks like a good bang/buck laptop that should work well with a dual firewire 800 Express Card..<was thinking of using 1 port for a RME I/O box and other port for external harddrive.

too many devices on the same IRQ means the firewire wont work right

the firewire MUST be on its own IRQ with MOST firewire devices to monitor 2 channels with no crackle/pop

I learned this from the $1000 Mackie ONYX firewire 1220 sitting useless in my studio until I build another desktop PC to support it.

My $1900 laptop evidently wasnt good enough ... even though it came with firewire, and I even tried workarounds with PCMCIA cards, etc

firerwire can be a ripoff BEWARE

oh **** :(. thanks for telling me, i guess this means the e1705 won't work properly with something like a RME FireFace 400 recording 8 tracks of 24bit/88.2khz simultaneously? I thought i'd be okay with using that express card slot with a firewire 800 card :(.