I am looking  into converting all the old home VHS tapes to dvd's.  I use a laptop for about everything so I am looking at getting a PCMCIA video capture card.  I do have a couple questions.....

What brand/model has anyone here tried?  Reviews?
What editing software do you reccomend?

Thanks

How old is your laptop?  If it has USB 2.0 ports, I would suggest one of the USB Video capture devices from pinnacle systems.  I can't recall any PC-Card based capture devices off the top of my head.

Of course if you aren't planning on doing any advanced editing of the VHS clips, you can always just use a side-by-side DVD-VCR Recorder to get the job done fast.

It's a new laptop, I thought the PCMCIA card would allow better editing than an external USB capture card?  Not sure though........  

If it is a new laptop, the USB version will be just fine.  You won't drop any frames or lose quality.  The biggest difference you will see in capture cards is the existance/ommission of on onboard dedicated mpeg2 encoder.  You will pay a slight premium for a dedicated encoder, but the results will be better/faster.  You will get smooth 30fps capture as long as you're not running too many apps in the background with both types of cards.

If your laptop is equipped with an ExpressCard slot, it will offer more bandwidth than USB2.0, but I don't believe anyone has released an expressCard capture card yet.  I could be wrong though

If you have a MiniDV camcoder with AV in you have everything you need.. You can copy to MiniDV and unload or, if you have firewire, you can go straight from VHS to the computer..

No firewire, it's a Lenovo T60 laptop.  
I'm leaning toward this USB2 unit: PINNACLE SYSTEMS Studio MovieBox USB Video Capture System

Looks like it has everything I'll need and more for around a hundred bucks...