i'm getting a new computer and i need to know what will work with what i want to do. i want a dvd burner to convert all my home movies into dvd and i want to be able to hook up the cam corder to it. some one told me i need a 80 gb hard drive to store a bunch of video is it true?i get a 10% discount with dell also. i dont know alot about computer stuff so i dont want to get the wrong stuff. and will these new dvd burners burn everything cd and dvd?

Get an abacus.  

80 GB is a good start. Be aware there are a few formats for dvd burners. You have to be sure your regular player will work with the format you pick.
The reason I say 80 GB is a start is the best you could hope to store would be like 7 DVD movies on it. Each dvd runs around 9 GB or so, sometimes more. A VCD, which will play on most dvd players, and will burn with a regular burner is around 650 MB. Quality is obviously different as well as play time.
If you are not concerned with keeping it on the computer after you are done, then you can get a smaller drive, but I wouldn't go much smaller than 40 GB.
I think dell was offering a free upgrade but it was a regular cd burner or a dvd player, not a dvd burner.
More memory is also important. 512 MB would be a good start as well. 256 the bare minimum.

Hooking up the cam corder is part of a video capture card you would have to buy seperatly.
This would let you hook up rca jacks to your computer to capture the video feed and convert it into different formats for your computer.

RAM and HD space are the 2 things you can never have enough of.  Well...unless the computer only can handle 2 gigs of RAM, then yes you can have too much....but I digress.

A good video capture card will run you a few bucks.  There are the GeForce4 cards TI4600 that do VIVO (video in video out) but because they are dual function in nature (also your monitor display card) they tend to be 'unsharp.'  Then there are stand-alone capture systems like this: [url]http://www.dazzle.com/products/dvc100.html[/url]  But I've never used any of them so can't tell you what they're like.  But I'd think it would be better than a video card that captures just because something like that isn't doing double duty.  It's just doing capture or something, no computer display to compete with RAM time for.

If you can get the discout with Dell go for it.  I recently got a 4500 (?) at my ex-office and you couldn't tell the thing was on it was so quiet.  Very nice.  Get as much RAM and HD space as you can up front, it will save you long term.  And make sure the HD is at least 7200RPM, not the cheaper 5000RPM units.  One of the bottlenecks in this type of thing is the physical I/O of the HD.  The faster the drive the better.

HTH

I'm just gonna say that for low cost home movie making you might want to look into a Macintosh. They include iMovie to assemble your video footage and iDVD to help master your DVD.

Flame away if you will all you PC fans but for what he wants to do a Mac is perfect.