Using firewire without firewire ports!? Worth or not?

[waterfall]

Hey,
I am using ableton 6.07 with m audio audiophile firewire but my laptop (dell d620, <2ghz core2 duo, 1gb ram, 120gb>) doesn't have firewire port, so i am forced to use PCMCIA FireWire IEEE1394 controller. Now to the point. Am i losing something, i mean, QUALITY, with that PCMCIA controller? for example with asio drivers i have:
Buffer size: 256 samples
Input latency: 7.80ms
Output latency: 7.80ms
Overall : 15.6 ms.
Should i sell this card or exchange with somebody that has for example echo card( btw what latency with 256 samples it has?)?
What should i do?
THanks for the answers and for the wasted time

[capo-wear-i]

The D620 uses a Ricoh chip to control it's PCMCIA port - they have been known to cause problems and have poor performance with certain PCMCIA Cards. They can also have problems with Firewire expansion cards (like the one connected to yr M-audio firewire). All the new Dells seem to use either the non-recomended 02micro or Ricoh chipsets See this thread - make sure you are sitting down first.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=73829

There doesn't seem to be any pattern other than various people having various problems with the Ricoh Chipset. If yr soundcard works then you are lucky.

There is no difference in sound quality between using a firewire card (via PCMCIA) and a dedicated PCMCIA card - sound quality is entirely dependant on the soundcrad, not the interface. latency is different story - you will get slightly lower latency with a PCMCIA compared to a FW card because of the extra buffers that all firewire interfaces use..

...The bottom line is if your soundcard works well at the moment at 256 samples (which is quite acceptable) count yourself lucky - if it ain't broke, don't fix it !

[forge]

I did it for a long time with no problems

if anything I found it more stable than the shitty 4 pin PC FW ports

but that wasnt on a Dell...dont know anything about that