I advise yu to stay away from dell laptops for music production.. they dont work with many firewire soundcards cos of the shite firewire controllers in em. Dell support is useless and costs a fortune and after spending £60 quid with them and £70 on a decent firewire pcmcia card they STILL couldnt tell me how to fix the problem and get things working.
As far as they were concerned the firwire port in them is solely for digital cameras and hard drives.. they didnt even know you could get firewire sound cards!!