I use a cheap Asus netbook to drive my teleprompter software when working in the studio. When I'm on location I very rarely take the teleprompter (actually I think never is more realistic) so I was thinking of using the netbook as a direct to disk capture device, rather than lugging the laptop about (I do a fair bit of overseas shooting and could really do with minimising my baggage!)

Snag: no firewire and no expansion slot.

The obvious question, therefore, is: is there any way for me to get DV into this netbook?

I have read about firewire->usb adapters but user reviews suggest these are a total waste of time and money.

Any thoughts? Cheers.

I've used the FW adaptor on a couple of old Dells and it worked fine. I actually had the cam plugged into 1 port and the HDD plugged into another and I had no problem capturing the tapes. Maybe I got lucky but I did that for about a year off and on until I didn't need to do it anymore and it never failed me.
YMMV.

this post intrigued me. So I looked into it for my net book. I have a lenovo that i picked up when it went disco at radioshack. Anyhow it has an expresscard expansion slot that you can get a firewire card for. So it seems like a possibility.

Ever get around to trying a netbook for capture?

one is the 34 type which has less i/o pins and thus narrow connector, and the other is 54 which has more i/o pins and wider connector.
most netbooks that have this expansion slot have the 34 type. the 34 type is actually a different connector for several USB ports (generally two) . most express cards are actually USB2.0 to xxxx where xxxx is whatever you need (COM/Parallel/Firewire/audio/video etc).

I posted on a similar thread about 18 months ago entitled "My experience using a netbook as a DTE". (sorry, can't figure out how to post a link!)

I have been using the Lenovo S10e (as discussed in the old thread) - probably captured c. 300 hours direct to the netbook via HDVSplit with no great problems.

i think this lenovo probably have hardware firewire input which makes it suitable for capturing.