Yes, I am doing essentially the same thing with the old desktop and the firewire card. It's just not powerful enough to do a complex mix down using some outboard effects. That's why I want to see if I get get the laptop to recognize it. It has a Xeon quad core.

I used to have a Desktop DAW with an Intel DP35DP motherboard.  It has a T.I. chipset firewire interface.  I had a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 that worked perfectly with that motherboard (in Vista and early Win 7).
 
I don't recall from the other thread.  Is there anything showing up in the Device Manager, either with an error code or an unknown device?  If not, that says Windows is not detecting the hardware and if Windows is not detecting it, forcing a driver install will do no good.

I checked, with the device disconnected and did not see any related drivers. I will check it this weekend with the Saffire 56 connected.