I have a brand new Inspiron 6000. I have been trying to use an external Firewire/1394 hard drive and DVD burner which both work just fine on an older Dell desktop and several Macs that I have access to, but neither will work on this laptop. After chatting with Dell support they suggested replacement of my motherboard, and today a Dell tech came and did just that, but it did not fix the problem. He claimed that the port was only meant for things like video cameras, and something like a drive is "too much" for it to handle. Even worse, where the drives just didn't work before, showing up with an error in device manager, now plugging one in causes a fatal blue screen error and forced shutdown. 1394 is a standard, shouldn't all devices certifieid for that standard work? How is it that this port does not meet the standard? Has anyone else had this problem, or have I just got really unlucky and had two bad motherboards in a row? More importantly, can anyone report getting external devices other than cameras working with the 6000's 1394 port?