I have a Gateway GX-450 computer. It has a 450 MHZ Xeon Processor and 256 MB Ram and a 16.8 GB Hard Drive, Win98SE for the OS and a regular video in/TVin/S-Video capture card. I also have a Digital Video Camera with an i.link port but no firewire card in the PC. My goal is to capture home video from the digital camcorder into my PC and burn the video onto a DVD to watch in a dvd player. What would you recommend I do? I heard that Windows 98 can store only like 2 GB of video?? So should I upgrade to Windows XP? Buy a Firewire card, and then install the DVD-RW? Or do you think Windows 98SE will be suitable for Video capturing? Should I install a Firewire card under Windows 98? Or should I somehow connect my digital video camcorder to the old capture card that I already have? I am trying to do this as cheaply as possible...I see a lot of DVD-RW's require Windows XP/2000 but can Windows 98 support a DVD-RW? Please recommend what I should do....Thanks!

Hi Tony I can see by what you write that you have some understanding of what video capturing entails. I see your mind veering towards 2000 or XP and your right to think so, I tell you now that a processor of 450mhz just will not cope. To me, and there may be people that will argue the point on this, you need at least a gig of processing power, crank the memory up to the same or at least 512mb. I know you wanna do it on the cheap mate but, as they say, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Hope this helps. Wolfey On a hot summers night would you offer your throat to the Wolf with the Red Roses?

I think you'll need a larger hard drive and also I'm quite sure that 98se only allows I think 37 minutes max (in that area) of video at one time. If you use winXP and the NTFS you will get unlimited recording time. Also, because your processor is smaller, you may want to up-grade your ram to at least 512. (in reality a larger processor would work best) I hope that helps. I don't know if 98se supports a DVD writer....sorry. If you need a simple solution, try mine. I try to give advise on things that have happened to my PC. Changes in registry can be FATAL! Glad to have a chance to help you.

With the right software win98 can record DVDs, although XP is better suited. I use PowerVCR and it automatically splits the movie up so it doesn't exceed the 2gb limit. I'm not sure how well a 400mhz system will do but I sure would suggest a bigger hard drive.

I had been looking into getting a DVD burner for my Win98SE 800Mhz PIII, 384Mb RAM. They all have minimum requirements and the lowest I have seen is 800Mhz with a recommended minimum of 1.2Ghz. I do meet the minimum but decided not to try it as I will surely be disappointed. But, I do have a CDR/RW and easily burn SVCD that play on my DVD player. The minimum requirement for the CDRWs is pretty low. Mine is set at 266Mhz PII, 64Mb RAM and Win95. I got it on sale at Staples for $20 after rebate. Buslink 52x. I connect my Sony Digicam to the USB1 port. I must admit that the quality is not as good as I had hoped or expected but the movie is on CD that plays on my home theater's DVD player. I believe it is due to the minimum requirement for transferring the video from the camera to the PC, according to the Sony Digicam's documentation, was 800Mhz so you may want to check your documentation too. Food for thought, Bryan

Hey, What's this "2gig" limit thing?? I run a PII-350 with 384ram. I frequently record screen capture with Camtasia program suite. True, I haven't went near 2gig files yet, but when running this program, it make the hardrive sounds like it is writing a 'temp cache' of the recording. I had it set up a few times to do a full screen capture, 800x600 of my webcam that was 'monitoring' my room via a screen saver mode. It ran all night like and most of the next day till I got home at i think 5 frames per second is what i had it set to. I don't have a video capture available for DVD's so I can't test it myself, yet. hehe Anyhow, if the caching and file creation is being done by a third-party software, and not windows, how would this 2gig limitation come into play? Sean If the house catches fire, SAVE the computer!!

Hi to all! I just wanted to add, that under W98SE and FAT32 HDD-partitioning you can easily have 4GB files max. I am grabing video through my TVcard and the program automatically produces 4GB-file segments, either in Mpeg2 or Avi (it depends on application used and the codec). Have also heard, that a program exists (called Paragon?) to "learn W98SE to speak NTFS" (ie. not only read, but also write data to NTFS-HDDs...)