Help a Dummy (yes Me) Out. Firewire question.

So I'm doing great with my Focusrite.  Getting good, decide that I am going to purchase something that can record more tracks at once.  I get on EBay, find a great deal, buy a stunning Mackie 1620i, so that I can mix practice AND record everyone individually.  This will be great......
 
OOPS.
 
My laptop only has USB ports (Dell Inspiron XPS 17), an HDMI port, and nothing remotely that looks like a Firewire port.
 
This laptop also does not have a PCMCIA slot.  So now the question is:
 
1) am I screwed?
2) is there an external something that will allow me to feed into my current laptop?
 
Thanks in advance.

That was my fear.  So question #1.  Is Firewire dead technology, or would buying a new laptop with Firewire be a good investment?
 
Question 2, if I got a new laptop, how hard would it be to transfer the license for X2 Professional from the old laptop to the new?

So the quick research I have done, it looks like the USB mixers only allow 2 channels of recording?  What's the point of that?  The Firewire would have allowed me to record all channels at once.

Unfortunately, you're SOL with the laptop.
 
The issue with laptops is that even if you get one with Firewire, it won't be TI chipset Firewire (likely won't perform well).
If the laptop has a cardbus slot (and you use a cardbus TI chipset Firewire controller) that doesn't guarantee good performance... as it's subject to the cardbus controller's chipset.  Sometimes it works well... other times not.
 
Mackie units are fussy about the Firewire controller (even when using TI chipset controllers).
SIIG units are expensive TI chipset Firewire controllers, but that's what I'd recommend for use with Mackie.