Tortured by a MiniDV camcorder

My friend lend me her Canon Camcorder MV830i yesterday so that I could convert the DV video into DVD or VCD. I also tried to took this opportunity to test drive a miniDV and see if I should buy one. And then I sucked into this nightmare of experiment trying to figure out WHY IN THE WORLD that my PC does not seem to recognize the Canon Camcorder. In fact, it's not just my PC's Firewire card not recognizing it, but also my laptop's Firewire card.

I always wonder why most of the DV I was dealing with usually not working. This time is no exception unfortunately.

And it wasted me almost 12+ hours on this stuff. Darn.