really choppy transfer of dv camcorder to laptop

hello. i'm really new to all this so please bear with me. i have a jvc mini dv camcorder and an hp pavilion dv7 laptop. i did not have a firewire port so i added a firewire1394 express card. the video is fine when i watch it on my camcorder, but when i transfer it to my laptop in mpg format, it is extremely choppy. i have limited media knowledge so any advice in simple to understand instructions will be greatly appreciated. thanks a lot!

what capture software are you using? and also do you know how much memory your system has?
operating system would be good to, IE WindowsXP, Vista, 7 etc...

Well there's two kinds of choppy...a) footage OK, but playback choppy due to codec issue or b/c system can't handle MPEG-2, or b) footage NOT OK, lots of frames dropped during capture/encoding. Software-based encoding-on-the-fly takes a lot from system resources, particularly in hi-res MPEG-2 - if that's what you're using.