Well, my frist report was a littel bit too early, as I have faced some problems with my two
Phonic FireFly 808 -- but they are sorted out now and yesterday I successfuly recorded 16 tracks via firewire onto my Dell 1720 notebook with 5400 rpm drives.....and the PC hardly shrugged the shoulders.
I had to deactivate the internal TTST-DVD drive as well as the wireless card, but that's it. I still can go online and I also can leave the internal soundcard activated, although I switched it off. The Dell is running under XP SP3.
I was considering buying a MacBook or another Mac when I first faced the problems with my setup (2 Phonic FireFly 808 cascaded or daisychained via firewire), got only unstable playback even only of a midi file, without any audio activities. Luckily the Macs are quite expensive, so after a lot of thinking and calculating I decided to try everything on the Dell first before investing in new (admittedly very attractive) hardware. I spent a lot of time on the net and finally found the solutions by trial and error, deactivating every single hardware component, because my latency monitor showed activity peaks every 7 seconds, which did not allow any proper recording or even playback with two interfaces. Finally I identified the DVD drive as the culprit, deactivated it and from then on it was nearly smooth sailing. Found the wireless card being responsible for intermittently distorted recording (started and stopped by itself on single channels randomly), So i switched it off as well. As I had done a new installation of XP and only had installed a lot of software except for my audio stuff, a video editor and MS Office (sic!), I did not bother to check for any services running ... and after some thinking how to record 16 tracks at a time all alone, I tried it and it worked perfectly.
I am not sure, how important the latency setting in the Control panel for the FireFly is, but just or fun i changed it down to 4ms in and out and 1000 microseconds streaming (don;t ask me what exactly that means), but it ran smoothly: I ran separate channels of Midi from a MU100R and a drum machine back into one firefly (Midi sent through both fireflies), 6 Microphones set up around the room and in front of my guitar amp, I fed the amp in Mono form
my PODxt Live and recorded the stereo line out form the amp as well as the stereo out from xt live into separate channels of the Phonics! No problem at all.
Next thing to try is what I can achieve in regards of mixing and plug-ins and probably VSTi's with my PC. I am quite confident that it will be good enough for a proper mix of anything I might ever record, keeping in mind that I intend to mix with analog limitations in mind (meaning not a dozen plug ins for sound reinforcement on each single track but rather using a few key effects only on mixing busses).
If anybody is interested, I will post my next experiences. I also would be very interested, if anyone has some 16 tracks lying around and wants to send the to me (mp3).... I would appreciate that as well as any collaboration in Blues and Blues-Rock (I am a guitarist, not good but I love to play and would love to exchange ideas and stuff)
I am quite a happy camper now having my stuff ready here in the south of the island of Sumatra!!!!
Hit a few drop-outs here and there, but had it happily running with low ASIO buffers for low-latency multi-channel live drum sample triggering once without a single hiccup for the whole of a 4 hour gig 
