Analogue-sequencer

While my main studio tools are Macintosh-based, a friend has given me 
an old Pentium laptop and I've got it up and running on a wireless 
lan card. I've downloaded P3Tools and am preparing to start using 
this machine as a general MIDI tool for my studio. The machine is a 
Pentium MMX machine from 1998 it looks like (Toshiba Tecra 550CDT)
running at 300-someodd MHz, 128M RAM, pretty slow and low power, 
running Windows 2000. So a couple of questions:

1) What is a good *cheap* MIDI interface (1 in/1 out) for this beast? 
I've got both a USB connector and a Cardbus slot available.

2) Besides P3Tools, can anyone suggest some free/shareware programs 
that would be worthwhile? I know about a patch generator for my JD-
800 that I want to get. A good sysex program/librarian perhaps? 

Thanks!

-Jim
www.touchxtone.com
www.sensitivechaos.com
www.myspace.com/jimcombs