i once captured an hour of dv video to my fujitsu laptop, with no dropped frames, and it only has a 5400 rpm internal drive... i have also successfully captured video to it when it had a 4200 rpm internal drive, never a dropped frame.

let's be clear that you don't need much ram to capture dv video... you could probably do it with 256k of ram, and the right hard drive.

all that was with winxp home, scenealyzer, and less than a gig of ram, but i had first disabled all the background garbage that comes with factory computers and win o.s. installs... ymmv, and i understand that most people would rather just edit video than horse around with having to learn how to clean up a computer to make it run right.