A pleasure to talk to you, even vicariously, Richard.
I built the machine myself, using a SOYO mb fast bus speed, 512 RAM, 1.7 P4, 60g HDD 7200 rpm and USB/Firewire connections. It uses Win 98 SE. It is not on the WWW and I intended to use it just for transferring home videos etc to DVD or CD. So far it has been a bust, since I have not been able to get it to recognise any capture cards except an old Pinnacle Linx which plugs into the USB port. But I have managed to get some old analog stuff onto discs, was expecting no trouble with a DV connection from the camera but the images are jerky as they are recorded and also on playback.
The program I use is Studio 8 and funnily enough when I tried to upgrade it from the Pinnacle website via a CD RW upgrade I down loaded, it told me the version I was using was unsupported and would not allow the upgrade. Maybe this was because it could not verify for itself through the web page. There is a trouble shooting section in this program which I followed, setting up the file system on the hard drive, but it did not work.
The sound part comes through normally, just the images are bad. The same camera works well on my wife's computer, a Sony running Win XP HE.
Any help would be appreciated,