New Lenove (IBM Thinkpad) T60P laptop, Windows XP (SP2), 2 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, ATI FireGL V5200 video card and DVD recordable drive with all the latest system updates and drivers. Connecting the Sony DCR-PC100 MiniDV camcorder through a removable IEEE 1394 PCIMICA Firewire card. The camcorder is recognized and can be operated by the computer, but trying to view, capture or transfer video (using Windows Movive Maker or InterVideo DVD Creator 3 Platinum) freezes the computer requiring a hard reboot.

Any ideas on what to check? Is there any possibility of a software(?) problem with the Sony itself? Are likely hardware suspects the removable PC firewire connection card, the internal PCI card, the motherboard or the video card (all new and all running the latest drivers and firmware)?

1. Try WinDV or DVIO in this thread
Easy Capture Program

2. Reboot your system.

3. Do not run any other programs during capture. You should not be doing anything else with your computer during capture. Other programs can easily interrupt the high rate of data flow to the hard disk during capture that can cause dropped frames. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and view the Task Manager to see a list of applications that are running. Any unnecessary operations can be stopped by selecting the process and clicking the End Task button.

5. DV AVI video will be about 13 GB per hour or about 220 MB per minute.



Rich

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FireWire Survey

Tried WinDV. Closed down as many other process as possible (this is a 2GhZ, 4 GB RAM dual-core XP system, so it should be able to handle things robustly), but the system still froze upon initiating video transfer and required a hard reboot.

I really don't recall too many cases of actual freezing of the computer, I don't recall it ever being the camcorder, there have been some odd cases of audio card drivers and sometimes video card drivers.


1. Go into Device Manager by Right Clicking on My Computer and select "Manage".

2. Under System Tools select "Device Manager", the "Computer Management" window will open.

3. Verify you have an "IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controller". It should have a device listed. If not, you do not have a Firewire card installed or the drivers have not been installed. Install the hardware from the Control Panel by selecting "Add Hardware" and let it do a hardware scan. Follow the instructions given on the screen.

4. If you have a listing for IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controller but it has an ! (exclamation point) or ? (question mark) to the left of it, the drivers are corrupted. Expand the listing and right click on the driver for the card. Select Uninstall. Reboot the computer and let Windows redetect and reinstall the driver for the hardware.

5. Right click on the host controller and select "properties" then "Troubleshoot".



You might want to reinstall/update latest DirectX: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.aspx Many applications use DirectX files for the Firewire IEEE 1394 transfer.

Try deleting the Firewire driver and let Windows detect the again camcorder. (If you didn't above)

Many Firewire problems have been fixed by just trying another Firewire card.


Thats all I can think of.



Rich

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FireWire Survey

Nothing is amiss with the IEEE 1396 Controller settings in Device Manager. Tried re-installing it and also updating the drivers, butl the problem remains.

Already have installed the latest version of DirectX. (In fact, all of the system's programs, drivers, etc. are the latest versions.)

My next try will be to replace the PCIMICA firewire connection card.

I purchased a PC firewire connection card (since this new Lenovo laptop has a slot to insert one in addition to a standard PCMIA card like the one that I had tried to use for firewire connection) and everything works fine now. Guess the faster speed-transfer rate of the PC card made the difference, although I suspect the PCMIA card should have worked too. In any event, now I don't have to be concerned with IBM trying to replace the entire system board.

Thank you to everyone for the helpful advice in this thread. I truly apprecate it.

Cheers!

TMitchell, glad you got it solved and thanks for getting back and letting us know you are alive!



Rich

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FireWire Survey