Hello,
My laptop is connected to the DV camera via the Fire wire port.The laptop is seeing the camera and the camera is seeing the laptop. The reason the camera is seeing the laptop is because on the screen it says "DV IN". The reason the computer sees the camera is because the Pinnacle studio reports the following in a dialog box when I try to start the capture: The box name is : "Capture Device intitialization error". The box reads that Pinnacle Studio SE is trying to initialize a DV or Digital 8 Camcorder via a 1394 port. It then gives me suggestion on Analog Video (which I do not need to heed because I have a Canon ZR-200 which is a DV camcorder.) It asks me to make sure that my camcorder is turned on and is in the VTR/VCR/Play mode and is connected to 1394 port. This is something I have confirmed that the suggestion provided above is indeed true on my camcorder.

Your help would be much appreciated.

I also describe in the Word file attached my effort through Windows to install the camera. The computer recognizes the camcorder but says that it is not installed correctly. On contacting the Canon folks they tell me that there are no special drivers available for the camera. It is all plug and play according to them.

I also tried the following in order:
a) Disabled the ZR200 driver from the windows device manager and rebooted the computer with the DV Camera turned on. I re-enabled the driver through the "Add Hardware" Control Panel. This did not help the problem.
b) De-installed the ZR200 driver. Rebooted my computer with the DV Camcorder turned on. The computer auto detected the ZR200 and went through the process of "Found New Hardware". It tried for about 25 seconds and returned a message saying "Cannot install the software. Driver is not intended for this platform".

The Windows device manager reports the Camera ZR-200 in the "AVC Device Class". It has an exclamation mark against the ZR-200 listing in the device manager. The following are the particulars on the computer:

IBM T-40
Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 1.
1.6GHz Pentium 4 Mobile.
Compaq 2- Port Firewire PCMCIA cardbus. Model: CPQFWCB

Regards,
Bhotu.