best bet is get an svideo cable and a tv input card, unless the vhs player has anything better you wont get much better than s-video, though tbh, with the quality of vhs anyway you can use damn near anything. I know you dont want it getting much worse but most transfers stuff will degrade the quality a bit.

The problem is finding a decent input card, the ideal would be scart but s-video is probably your only option. Unless you happen to have access to a dvd recorder with scart, s-video is your best bet.

theres a lot os phots etc... shops that do that kind of thing... and if its onlt the one tape it will probably be chaper to pay them to do it than to buy the kit for it...

Ive done this with a tape before. Luckily I had a tv tuner with an s-video in. Once you get the video to your pc in whatever format (probably mpeg), the best would be to re-encode the video with virtualdub to allow you to have a play with the filters and see if you can clean it up a bit. Also load the audio into audacity, and you should be able to make it sound MUCH better.

You can pick up a suitable tuner for ~£25-£30 from ebuyer, then when youve recorded your tape, you can use it to watch tv too