Capturing DV camcorder to laptop w/o firewire port

[pandy]

Avoid VIA, use TI, instead USB (which is very poor interface) go for PCCard (ExpressCard) with IEEE-1394 based on TI chip.

[jjj333]

That means Sony sold me an expensive Cam with faulty firewire connection. "It' a Sony" !
One more reason to stay away from Sony!
I cannot even write an email of complain to their service, because they don't even have an email address. Yesterday, I tried to send them their contact form and whatever I did, their system was tuned to reject any customer contact. I now live in Chile, but bought my Cam in Australia and thus, tried to contact Sony.au - It could be my email location automatically disallowed contact.
That's only one of 1000 problems you get with Sony goods and service. Its time to get out of this.

[VideoTechMan]

I have two Sony camcorders, both Digital8 and I have no problems with them via Firewire. One thing I did notice though, if using with Windows 7, Win tends to load a different firewire driver which has caused problems with my Panny AG-DV2000 deck since it seems to not see the deck. I had to change the Windows driver to use the Legacy Firewire drivers and it saw the deck with no problem.

You may want to check that and see if its set for legacy.

[jjj333]

Thank you for the good advice, but it comes too late... for "I am done with firewire cards"! Now I bought that lousy EazyCap garbage and added a heatsink to an IC, which got very hot on it to make it last. That at least allows me to d/l the videos to PC. The surely are not the best, but then again Sony products are not the best either, as I earned the hard and expensive way. Like it or not, I there's nothing I can do to escape the "Chinese throw away mentality".
Americans allowed them to control the markets and so, we are now in for stupid surprises. Yesterday I got another shock when I tried to sweep a bit of dust away: I grabbed the rarely used two year-young Chinese dustpan and it fell into pieces! The same happened with a Chinese made plastic bucket. That means, they now "especially create" a type of plastic, which automatically crumbles up after a set time! They must be thinking we Westerners are all idiots? That type of mentality is quite upsetting and last not least, a waste of natural and human resources.