You'll typically find mixed opinions on the matter of Firewire vs. USB2.0. I have an HP laptop, with a 2.0GHz AMD processor, and 1GB of RAM. I use a PreSonus FireBox with it, which connects via Firewire (1394), and haven't had any issues with it. From what I've been told, Firewire is much more friendly on CPU usage, and USB tends to use much more CPU. This can be a big deal with a laptop, since they aren't very efficient on CPU usage, as opposed to a desktop, or a mac. However, if just simple recordings are what you want to do, I don't see any reason USB external soundcard wouldn't work.