Thats a very common problem with alot of PC gear. There are too few IRQs, and even though in theory its supposed to work correctly with PCI shared IRQs ( such as video and anything else ) , in practice it just doesnt work that way.

I have the exact same problems again and again with all sorts of hardware. The only way I can get around it, is to custom pick every single peice of gear that goes into a PC to make sure it all works with each other.

The only thing I could suggest is to check for a BIOS setting in the laptop that turns off the graphics card IRQ. It may not be possible on a laptop, but its usually possible on desktop systems.

On something important like a sound device, its a good idea to check the manufacturers recommendations for systems before dumping money on a peice of gear. As far as I'm concerned, the sound card is more important than what brand the laptop is anyways ( I dont actually like using laptops though, so I'm probably somewhat biased )

And I agree with Mark, but I would take it a little big farther. PC's and Firewire just dont get along. Even USB can be a bit spotty because of the CPU hit thats taken most of the time to work with USB devices. Because alot of the processing for USB devices is done by the host cpu and not the card itself ( this is not true for all devices ), its really easy to run into resource starvation problems.