putting home videos on external memory

[amy123]

I am looking for some great advice as I am extrememly frustrated. I am capturing home videos of my little ones on our camcorder that tapes them onto DV tapes. I am then putting them on my desktop which has windows 98 and burning them onto DVD's. Our desktop is full of memory and so we purchased a new laptop but it does not have the same port for videos, only USB. The desktop has enough room that I can uplaod the video and burn it to DVD, but then I would need to erase it to do the next. My fear is that I will loose my precious memories by having the DVD's get scratched or lost. I started making two of each but thought getting an external hard drive would allow me to burn a DVD and then save on the external hard drive allowing me to erase from the desktop and tape over on the Dv camcorder tape. The problem is the desktop is old school Windows 98 and the memory is full so I wouldn't be able to instal it. I can't afford to take the DV tapes to somewhere to get professionaly burnt onto DVD's. Being it burns them live time, doing this for the many tapes I have, twice, would take days that I do not have.

[Geek-9pm]

Welcome!
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Yes, Windows 98 is now rather old. Please explain what kind of connection you recorder and computer use for video.
Any look like these?
http://www.google.com/search?q=rca+to+usb+video+adapter&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Tell more about the laptop you have. How much space does it have on the hard drive.

[truenorth]

Unless i am missing something there is a very simple and inexpensive way to accomplish your task.
1.you have been able to get them from your recording device to your win98 computer.
2.Using a portable usb flash drive (i am sure your win98 and your new laptop both have usb ports).
3.after putting your video on the 98 computer transfer them to the flash drive (don't need a large capacity one if you transfer them one at a time).
4.With the video on the flash drive plug it into your laptop and transfer your video.
5.once on the laptop you can burn it to cd/dvd as the computer is able and you can also retain it on the laptop HDD if space is not a problem.
6.Then delete it from the flash drive and reuse for your next video,etc/etc/etc.
 Caution: remember to properly "remove the flash drive " via the task bar icon before physically removing it from either usb ports of both computers otherwise the data MAY be lost (on the flash drive). Once you have done this a couple of times it will become automatic. Remove the video from the win 98 computer ONLY after you are certain that they ARE on the laptop. truenorth

[Geek-9pm]

Man y USB flash drives do NOT work on Windows 98. 

There is no native (supplied by Microsoft) support for USB in Windows versions prior to Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, or MS-DOS. Windows 95 OSR2.1, an update to the operating system, featured very limited support for USB. During that time, no generic USB mass storage driver was produced by Microsoft, even for Windows 98. This meant that a device-specific driver was needed for each type of USB storage device.

So make sure the USB thing has the driver for Windows 98.

[Computer_Commando]

...we purchased a new laptop but it does not have the same port for videos, only USB....

Please explain what type of "port" is on the desktop that you are using for transferring from the camcorder.

[truenorth]

Geek, While this CAN be the case I am using 2 different desktops (win98SE) that do have USB ports and while i do have to follow certain procedures NOT necessary on later O/S's they do work.Hopefully the O/P will be similarly blessed.(if they ever return).truenorth