WinDV dropping frames and picture glitching?
 

I'm quite new to this archiving business, so I got myself a Windows XP computer to transfer my miniDV tapes using WinDV, and for quite some time it worked correctly. Until some days ago I decided to try to "capture" the picture coming from my camcorder, through firewire straight to my PC. It worked correctly, but when I tried to do it again, my PC bluescreened (0xF4), and it kept doing that every time I pressed the capture button (picture freezes, the buffer goes all the way up to 100, and then crashes the PC). After I got that sorted out (not sure how), it didn't bluescreened anymore, but instead, it would start to drop a lot of frames and show artifacts and glitches on the picture, sometimes even freezing and/or crashing. My guess is that it's something hardware related, but if someone knows something else, please let me know. I'll attach some examples of what I'm talking about.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, the camcorder works fine, and the tapes are also fine.

For troubleshooting, eliminate the tape variable: set the camcorder to Camera mode and capture the live feed with WinDV.

I agree that it sounds like the PC hardware is screwed. Luckily Firewire cards are cheap, if that's the problem.

I've already tried that, but the same thing happens: glitches, dropped frames, freezing, crashing. My PC has two firewire ports, tried in both of them, same problem.

Is it a fresh/clean win XP install? If it's an original XP install from 20 years ago and has had a ton of different stuff installed there could be programs/drivers/etc causing issues.

Yeah, it's an old XP machine. But I find hard to believe that it's a software issue, because I don't recall installing anything new after downloading WinDV, and I've made with it transfers without any problems. Everything started after I captured the live video coming from my camcorder straight to the PC. Besides, regarding the glitches and dropped frames, sometimes it drops a few frames, sometimes a lot, sometimes the PC doesn't even detect my camcorder. That's why I think it's a hardware problem. I just don't know what is it exactly.

Quick update: changing the CMOS battery seems to have solved my problem, somehow, and now I'm finally able to transfer without dropped frames.

In addition, you can run AVPS DV Analyzer on the captured stream to validate that there are no errors. (Sometimes I have few frames with DV concealment, because tapes shelf life is not that good)