I use my laptop for music, and my audio interface runs on Firewire. For various long and complicated reasons, I really don't want to use a USB interface when there are a lot of channels to record. My current laptop is kind of old, but it works fine for my purposes. The thing is, even though mine has firewire built in I still need to use an expansion card because the built-in firewire port isn't good enough for an audio interface. Don't know why, and don't care. In any case, the problem I have is that most laptops these days don't have a place for expansion cards. This is becoming a real problem. Am I the only one in the world that needs expansion card slots? Does anyone else here have some weird, quirky reason for still needing PCMCIA?