Video production advice needed

Although my background is actually in video - I've been concentrating on still photography for the past ten years or so...and I'm a little rusty in the video production dept. these days.

I've been workin' on a new video for our site, shootin' with a consumer-grade Sony TRV340 digicam - but the laptop I'm currently workin' with doesn't have firewire input (my older Toshiba that died recently DID have firewire capability).

What's the best way of gettin' the footage from the camera to the laptop without quality degradation? I loathe having to use USB transfer since I know there's significant loss involved and its slow as molasses in January.

Would a good option be to copy/burn to a DVD (I have a stand-alone DVD writer) and then edit/transfer from the DVD to .wmv format on the laptop?

get a PCMCIA Card for it, cost you about $50

you want "to the laptop without quality degradation?" yet you mentioned WMV, im pretty sure wmv stands for 'WHAT happened to My Video'

http://www.firewire-1394.com/cards-f...ok-cardbus.htm

failing that, usb should be ok.. (its actually faster than firewire400)