Using Firewird 4 pin to 4 pin with laptop on moviemaker

I rented a camcorder from school which I am using to create videos for a class and I have this firewire with each end the same and I believe it's a 4 pin to 4 pin on each end, but when I connect the cord into the camcorder and then into my computer, Movie maker does not recognize anything connected when I click "Capture from device" ...

The digital camcorder is ON and it's set to PLAY, but I can't get movie maker to read it! Can someone help me please.

 

It could be one of three things:
1) camera
2) firewire cable
3) computer

The first two are easy to eliminate
#3? try going into devices and see if the 1394 is there or if there's a yellow exclamation mark next to it.

 

Everything is set up. I even had Dell assistance and they told me to do some reboot thing and reset defaults and then I uninstalled and reinstalled the 1394 device. How do I know if it's the firewire or not. I did borrow the firewire from school, but how can I tell if it's working or not.

I don't get anything on my computer which says that new hardware was found or anything. I really need this fixed please!

 

Try using a different firewire cable or if you have a firewire external device like a hard drive or something. Start eliminating things. But most likely from my experience it's your computer.

 

Yep. Core 2 Duo user, right?
So far, there have been major problems reported with the firewire on some of the Core 2 Duo Dell laptops.

I'm waiting for a response from customer service so i can return my Latitude D820, because the firewire port doesn't work properly.

There's a thread here that discusses the problem.