Just done a trial run. As soon as I connected the DV and turned on it was recognised by XP (via firewire port). Opened movie maker and came up straight away seeing the dv cam. Start stop controls available through the PC etc as normal. Default recording is to med quality wmv format but you can change it to DV quality avi - just be warned that it takes up a lot of disc space - 21 seconds is 76.9 mb. So it's worth converting to mpg2. They are about 150mb for 3.5 minutes.