it's very rare to find a laptop PC these days with a Firewire port. most are usb.

About the only option for a PC laptop is to find one with an ExpressCard slot and then fit a TI-chipset Firewire card into the slot. Not that many laptops are fitted with ExpressCard/34 slots, but some of the Lenovo ThinkPads have them. For a FireWire card, look at the range from [[url=http://[/URL]="http://raincomputer…"]Rain [/]="http://raincomputer…"]Rain [/]or the StarTech EC13942 if you can find one.

Thanks... leaning towards going with a tower. It's baffling to think they're so hard to find.

It has to do with what the 99% use a laptop for-Facebook and games. Those of us that require I/O are basically screwed or will have to upgrade our interfaces to USB3 or Thunderbolt. Planned obsolescence or smart business....you decide.

I'm actually leaning towards a rack mounted PC now that I have done some more research. Anyone know of any good Canadian companies that design and sell DAW rack mountable PC's?

PC Audio Labs and Rain Recording. There a few others and Sweetwater also sells a Mac Mini recording package. The only potential issue with using a Mac versus a PC is the session software and the file type. Stick with BWAV and make sure that your DAW program is available in both platforms then buy whichever computer floats your boat. FWIW, a rack mounted machine is an excellent way to go.

I feel you're going in the right direction with this if you want to use FW technology. I've personally given up on FW. I don't feel FW ports are as stable as USB for one thing. Remember, USB has actually been around since Win95. The ports were built into the motherboards but they weren't externally accessible until USB devices became more popular. USB then became a preference over Serial ports (at least on the User side). Field techs (like me, at the time) were a little peeved about this because Serial ports were necessary to interface with a wide variety of networking devices.

Recently I bought a laptop and went through the same thing the OP is going through..."hey, where's the FW port?". Very few FW ports are available and it looks like that's the wave of the future for mobile computing, so I chose a simple USB interface. At first I went with SD's USBPre2 but it didn't play very nicely with WinXP SP3 (which I have on 2 of my other machines) so I settled on a 2i2 from Focusrite. The 2i2 BTW is a surprisingly great little box with excellent pre's.

A rackmount PC with FW ports is the way to go if you don't need to worry about being "pickup and go" mobile. It sure is nice though to be so care-free with a Win7 laptop.