I've just put in an offer for an old windows XP computer with firewire so I can run some of my outdated hardware. Firewire capture, 35mm scanner and a big flatbed (negative) scanner. Once captured transfer via USB flash to my better computer to enhance.
I'm retiring soon and thought I could maybe make some pocket money doing transfers.

Hmm, I put a Firewire 400/800 card in my Win10 tower and it recognizes my Digital8 camcorder and HD24 drives. But I suppose it's possible the slide scanner isn't supported by Win10.

One benefit. I can leave it to trundle on capturing while I use the good one.

You’d have to upgrade the drivers from the scanner manufacture to get it to work. Chances are the manufacturer never upgraded the drivers on a scanner that old. You can check out VueScan and see if they make software that supports your scanner. I use VueScan for some of my old Nikon film scanners.

Another option is that you can use VirtualBox on a computer with plenty of RAM and run an instance of Win XP within it. Using the interface (and a little bit of geek knowledge) it's possible to five the virtual machine (running XP) direct access to USB connections and likely Firewire ports too.

Andrew

Win 10 is not a great os for video capture the way XP is. 10 has update reminders and other potential interruptions going on. XP Pro being the best for the work.

Also 10 updates are known to uninstall the FW card which becomes a hassle to reinstall on that os.

I also keep a couple of old XP boxes running for the older hardware as well as software.

Great to have an old Sony Vegas NLE sw flying high with no crashes. Some old Adobe sw working on scans from long gone scanners.

Everything working like a charm.

Windows XP is totally crazy to even consider. It’s a ticking time bomb and every boot up takes it closer to simply not working. My windows 10 machines are to5ally happy with FireWire and I’m using an old Presonus firepod because the performance is great, and it’s happily working on the very latest version of Cubase. Why on earth would you run an old clapped out motor car with no spares, terrible fuel consumption just because you really liked the radio! If your accountant tells you your brand new MacBook M1 isn’t really an asset anymore, just an expense, why would you want to even own a computer so old as one running XP. I loved XP, and still have a laptop running vista, but the minute it dies, it’s gone. I dare not use it for anything critical.

Some folks seriously into SD analog video capture are strong advocates of Win XP, the problem being finding drivers and connectors breakouts for favored capture cards (e.g., ATI AIl-in-One cards). The point being since HD became dominant the hardware vendors are not giving much attention to analog SD source capability, and capture devices may struggle with the sloppy analog signals common to VHS, VIdeo8, etc. (Line and frame TBCs may be essential for many tapes.)

For DV/HDV/Digital* sources generally IEEE1394 is be best approach for initial ingest but DV is not best format for editing after capture dues to its lossy nature. Other intermediate CODECs are better.

Win 10 does IEEE1394 OK, but many devices need the old (2006 vintage "Legacy") OHCI drivers to work, and some IEEE1394 cards may be problematic. Cards based on the TI chip set seem to be favored. Win 8 and Win10 did not ship with the legacy drivers, but they can be downloaded from Microsoft's Win8 support area.

Old scanners are another issue. I have a Canon FS-4000 I use with VueScan on a Win7 PC. My main issue is the scanner is S L O W.. It uses slow SCSI or USB 1.0 interfaces. These days I reserve it for APS cartridge capability.

For analog video capture today on a Win10 box I use a BMD DeckLink Mini Recorder and Mini BMD Converter Analog to SDI.

In any case the video capture PC should be stand alone air-gapped from the WEB, especially old systems no longer supported by up-to-date AV systems, with minimal background processes,