i have a ibm thinkpad for live playing and mobile recording which works nicely. your question makes a lot of sense:-) for laptops that have a pcmcia (hope i spelled it correctly) slot and that do not have native firewire ports, you can simply buy an inexpensive card with fw ports. important: TI (texas instruments) chipset! i do not know why exactly, but i've read several times that this is critical. many of the cheaper notebooks do not seem to have this. have fun oxy