Check your pc first to see if it already has a firewire port. If not, there are many brands of firewire cards you can buy.

I personally prefer firewire ports built into the motherboard. But, I also use a Maxtor firewire card for my wife's pc which doesn't have a built in firewire port.

Assuming you have the hardware and software, you can then transfer video from the MiniDV camcorder to the pc. You can save in either:

1. Uncompressed DV-AVI which yields the best quality but also takes up the most hard drive space. expect 1 hour of footage to take up ~12GB of hard drive space.

or

2. You can also save in mpeg2 format. The big advantage of mpeg2 is that it takes up a fraction of the space required by DV-AVI. The tradeoff is that it is heavily compressed. You'll need a powerful pc to save mpeg2's reliably. Otherwise, you risk having the audio fall out of sync with the video, among other problems.