Dell has really went down hill. They seem to concentrate more on looks than
quality hardware these days. I have pretty much stopped using them since I went
through an identical scenario as you just described via my last laptop purchase
from them.
In a message dated 8/28/2007 2:26:53 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
dave@linkify.com writes:
Two
observations/hypotheses:
1 - the demise of PCMCIA
2 - poor
mainstream acceptance of Firewire
I just got an MOTU UltraLite (audio
digital interface) that didn't work
with the Firewire in the laptop,
perhaps either because it didn't like
the 4-pin format (needs 6-pin), but
also because MOTU requires either
the TI or the Lucent 1394 chipset, and
the laptop used a Ricoh 1394
chipset.
I decided to get a PCMCIA
Firewire card, and found out that, to my
surprise, my (also new) laptop
didn't have a PCMCIA slot. It has an
ExpressCard slot, which is not
reverse compatible to PCMCIA. (I also
have to buy a new wireless data
card.)
So, I bought an ExpressCard Firewire card that has both 6-pin
and 9-pin
800/400 1394
(http://www.siig.com/ViewProduct.aspx?pn=NN-EC2812-S1).
Except for
having a hunk of plastic hanging off the side of my laptop, I
have been
EXTREMELY happy with it. ALL of my latency problems have
disappeared
(I was using a pretty beefy but single core laptop with USB2
- Tascam
428).
In addition to the conspicuous deprecation of a PCMCIA slot,
it's
curious that a $4000 Dell multimedia
laptop
(http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1710?c=
us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19)
- with 6 USB ports - only has a single, 4-pin 1394
port.
Dave
Huffman
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