i have a sony trv 22e didgital cam corder running with a usb cable to my asus a7v333 mobo is it worth getting a firewire pci card to run it with?also i need a bigger h drive i was looking into getting a serial ata card and a western dig 80gb h drive would it be all worth while for the extra cost or not?
cheers

Firewire cards can be picked up quite cheaply on ebay (just checked, you can get them for £12 + postage) if you want one and have a spare PCI slot (or go for a combined USB2/firewire card?). With firewire or USB2 you could also add an external version of the WD hard drive which would save replacing your existing drive.

There's no reason why you can't go for a Serial ATA card (unless the firewire card has taken up the last free PCI slot!) and hard drive to suit, just take some time to work out exactly what you want to do with your PC and then see whether the expense/complication/effort is justified. Then ignore all reason and common sense if it isn't and go and buy them anyway!

Feel free to ignore any of the above...

thanks for the advice i have ordered a firewire card its on its way.like you say a sata card is around £15 then i will get a sata wd hdd prob 80gb wd.how do i transfer all wot i have from my old drive to the new one?

I haven't installed a Serial ATA drive myself, but I would expect that you should be able to set your PC to boot up from the new hard drive when you install and keep your existing hard drive as a slave. My personal preference would actually be for a nice clean install of the operating system, all the hardware drivers, and software. Once the new install is up and working it should be possible to cut and paste all your remaining data across onto the new hard drive. Then you can reformat your old drive and simply use it for storage.

If you haven't already done this, now would be a good time to put together an archive CD of all the latest drivers for your hardware from the manufacturers' web sites, the latest service pack for your version of Windows (SP1a for XP and SP4 for 2000 can be downloaded from http://www.webattack.com) and the current version of any other software/patches that you have installed off the web, eg Nero updates, Zone Alarm, Spybot and the like. Time spent downloading now will get your system back on its feet quicker after your new HDD is installed.