firewire

This is one amazing product, I got this for my laptop Inspiron 8100. Though, I already had a 4 pin firewire port but the problem as you may or may not know is, 4-pin firewire can not supply power to the connected device. Most of the firewire devices i have are dependent on bus-power e.g. Compact Flash reader, so I chose adaptec card bus as it have an optional power input line so the connected devices can draw power.
Overall, its very handy and useful plus the installation was smooth (you just plug & play, XP will instantly detect it).

p.s. just a little thought, firewire have nothing to do with "video editing" nor it will improve with using different software. FIREWIRE is a communication standard i.e. IEEE 1394/1394b , the later is also known as FireWire800 and gives twice as fast speed as normal firewire.

Installation was a snap.
I was downloading movies from my Sony Digital Camera and burning movies on a CDR in 10 minutes.

Adaptec has a Duo Connect PCMCIA card that has both a firewire and a USB 2.0 port. This is perfect for video editing on a PC laptop: connect a camera to the firewire port and an external hard drive to the USB 2.0 port. When not video editing, you can use the extra USB port for your printer, mouse, etc., or keep the hard drive attached to run games.