Just bought another laptop (HP elitebook 8460p) and it has on board firewire, no idea which chipset and it only has the small 4 pin port but as an experiment I loaded the drivers and plugged it in.
I had Reaper installed as a quick test and surprise surprise it all worked perfectly 
windows 7 x64 , running at 64 samples.
here’s a screen grab with the DPC.
I haven’t done anything to the laptop as it’s new I just turned off the wifi.
I’m going to add a sandybridge i7 quad/16 gigs of ram and an SSD OS drive and a 750gig 7200 audio/sample drive in the dvd caddy and it should make a killer 14 inch laptop
for half the price of a macbook pro MC