Outdated Laptop Technology Sucks

Seems like I may have a slight dilemma here. 

I have the EMU 1616M Cardbus card, which has worked well for me in both recording (not Sonar), and playback. Of course this was on my Sager P4 laptop that has the Cardbus slot.

Now its a bit disheartening to know that the Cardbus slot is no longer available. Its the reason why I have held on my P4 laptop for now in its 7th year because I still have some cards that uses that slot. Now that I plan to learn how to use Sonar 8 with the 1616M it looks like I will end up stuck because of the new current laptops does not have the slot. And I don't have the money right now to buy another audio interface, especially when I have a $400 system that already works well.

I may have to look into buying a slightly older laptop, possibly one of the ThinkPad T61 series since it does contain both the Cardbus and Expresscard slot. I do plan to build a new desktop for my new DAW (and possibly another one for strictly video editing/light audio work) but that won't be for quite awhile and, I need to dedicate a room for my studio. So until that time I want to learn on the laptop system to where I can get the hang of it and go from there. At least the T61(p) series have the Core 2 Duo processor and can use 4GB RAM in it so at least I can utilize the 64-bit operation. I don't know much about the plugins and such so i will have to read about that.