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It’s worth mentioning one other tape format – Sony’s Digital8. I recall this being quite popular, at least in the UK, in the early 2000s (we had a whole set of D8 camcorders at the school where I worked at the time; they were much cheaper than equivalent MiniDV ones and possibly more robust due to the larger tape transport).

They used cassettes the same size as Video8/Hi8 (and, indeed, the AIT data backup system – Sony got a lot of value out of their 8mm helical-scan tape transports) but recorded the video digitally like MiniDV.

Digital8 camcorders also connect to the PC via FireWire/IEEE1394, except that Sony called it iLink (Apple missed a trick there!) so many people don’t realise that it’s the same thing.

The video is returned to the PC in standard DV format, the same as with a MiniDV camcorder.

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Will Fastie

Have you tried the Vista drivers for the Radeon 9600? They may possibly work with Win10.

You can find them here: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/legacy?product=Legacy1&os=Windows%20Vista%20-%2032

If the installer says you don’t have a compatible OS, you could try updating the driver from Device Manager and pointing it at the folder where the self-extractor has been unpacked.

(I’ve successfully got Win10 working using Vista drivers for a slightly-newer Radeon Xpress 200M on an old – 2006-vintage – laptop.)

I’d also suggest looking at Sony Movie Studio – it’s part of the highly-respected and widely-used Vegas family of video editing tools and is very capable and easy to use. You can see a comparison of the features on offer in the different editions here.

I’m a little puzzled. You say that the device supports Bluetooth but you then go on to talk (in more than one place) about plugging in a USB Bluetooth adaptor to use a Bluetooth mouse. Does the device support Bluetooth or not? If it does then you shouldn’t need to plug in an adaptor – just use the built-in Bluetooth transceiver for the mouse as I have done on my trusty ThinkPad X40 for many years. (I use the USB BT adaptor that came with the mouse to give my desktop Bluetooth capability.)

Your best option is a bigger C: drive, as others have already recommended.

You may be able to claw back a little space to tide you over using the disk cleanup tool and/or some manual cleanup. Have a look in C:WindowsSoftwareDistributionDownload – this can sometimes fill up with orphaned files from Windows updates, etc. and can be emptied. The worst that can happen is that Windows has to re-download any outstanding updates. Moving the pagefile from C: to D: will also buy you a few GB – go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced system settings -> Performance Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual memory and set it to “System managed” on D: and “No paging file” on C:. It’s generally safe to ignore the warning about a minimum size on C: but if you’re worried, just set an additional small fixed-size pagefile on C: to satisfy Windows. If you don’t use hibernation on your PC, you can also reclaim a few GB (equal to the amount of RAM you have) by turning the hibernation facility off – open a command prompt as administrator and type “powercfg -h off”.

I would strongly recommend against using the “Compress this drive” option, especially on the C: drive, unless you’ve exhausted/ruled out all other options, such as moving your user files onto another partition/drive, disk cleanup, partition tweaking, etc.

NTFS compression seriously degrades the system’s performance – not only does the system have to decompress everything on the fly (which is, admittedly, less of an issue with a fast modern processor), but the way it is implemented effectively makes every compressed file 100% fragmented and there is nothing defragmentation software can do about it. (The structures that keep an “index” of where everything is on the disk, instead of saying something like, “The file ‘letter.doc’, starts at block 123456 and goes on for 8 blocks,” have to say, “The file ‘letter.doc’, compressed from 8 blocks to 4, is in blocks 123456, 123457, 123458 and 123459.” This is much less efficient, of course.)

Hope this helps,
Stephen

It’s worth pointing out (I don’t think you mentioned it in your article) that when you attach the second router to the network after configuring it for use as an access point, you should plug the patch cable into one of its switch ports (the “internal” LAN-facing side of the router – the yellow ports on the router you use as an example) and not into the blue “external” WAN port that would normally face the internet. If the cable goes to the WAN port, the router will still attempt to act as a router and firewall for traffic passing through it, which is precisely the functionality you are trying to disable.