Hmmmmmmmm! I remember the good old days of windows millenium edition. I used to use that to capture from firewire using Ulead Video Studio 4. No problems whatsoever. It was a Sony Digital 8 Camcorder though. To be honest I don't know the sharp camera at all. I must admit that I though MiniDV was MiniDV. I tried to check with Sharp's UK WEB Site tonight, but it is down because of a major communications failure in Manchester. So I'll find out later and post back.

As for the Pinnacle Studio thing. Check the minimum system requirements against your own PC. If you are on Windows ME then that implies quite old. You can check minimum requirements at

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/docloader...c&division_id=

Note though that Pinnacle recommend Windows XP for this product (but claim it will run on Windows ME). Take great care on this as Pinnacle software has a bit of a habit of being extremely fussy!

What should you do? Well I upgraded my rather modest 700Mhz Duron PC to XP about 2 years ago. And it is still going strong producing reasonable movies and DVDs using Ulead kit mostly (Mediastudo Pro and Movie factory). I have 512Mb RAM and a dedicated Video disk. OK I admit it I have to read a copy of War and Peace when I render any movie of any great length. The upgrade to XP is worth it though for a whole load of reasons, mostly to do with system stability. Check that your PC can handle it though.

First of all find out if its worth keeping that camera. I'll keep looking for a spec and post back.

Good luck meantime.