Getting deployed again for quite a while - will necessitate a new laptop recording solution to take with...and my interfaces, while very nice, are firewire in nature. Anything on the market now that still has firewire or express card slots available?

I just went through this (looking for decent laptop with firewire). Settled on a dell 3550. Has express slot, usb 3, estata for recording drive and backlit keyboard. Set it up as dual boot so I can still do my everyday work. DAW side, it took a while to get rid of pops and crackles, but a BIOS update and disabling pretty much everything in the BIOS like fingerprint reader, wireless, speedstep etc means it now flys. Rock solid, i5 - 8Gb RAM runs with tons of plugins and tracks no problem. The only other laptop around I could find with either firewire or express slot was the IBM range but they were about 3 times the price of this baby.

The 17" Macbook Pro still has the express slot. Sadly they took it off the 15" a couple years ago.

I just specced an HP ProBook for a friend. It's only an i3 CPU but as we know it's hard to find a laptop with an expresscard slot any more, and it's hard to beat $400. We needed the Firewire for his Presonus consoles.