I recently purchased a Motorola Razr V3x mobile phone, and the people in the shop said that I can easily transfer video from the phone onto a computer or DVD. However, I have not been successful in figuring out how to transfer video. Can you help with transferring the video to my computer?

As I have not used your model of phone when researching your question I went onto the Motorola website and downloaded the product manual for your phone. If you have lost your manual, this can be downloaded by going to www.motorola.com/au then click the “Support” link at the top of the page. On the next page click the “Manuals” link and then “Mobile Phones”. In the list of phones select “MOTORAZR V3x” and download the “User Guide”. On page 44 of the user guide there is a heading “cable connections”. This shows the location of the mini-USB connector on your mobile phone. You should have received a USB cable with your mobile phone which you can connect to the phone, and then connect the other end of the cable to a spare USB port on your computer. If a USB cable did not come with the phone you will need to purchase a cable. Even though the manual recommends a specific Motorola cable, a standard mini-USB to standard-USB cable which can be purchased from most computer stores should suffice. These cables cost around $20.

Once you have determined how the phone should connect to the computer the next step is making sure the relevant software is installed on your computer so you can download data from the phone. Back on the website where you downloaded the manual for the mobile phone, you will see a link on the left-hand side of the page which says “Software & Drivers”. Click this link and on the next page click “Motorola Phone Tools”. You will see there is a link titled “Supported Phones”. I checked the compatibility of your phone with Motorola Phone Tools (MPT) and your phone is compatible with version 4.04b which supports (amongst many other things) image studio and video studio, which presumably allows you to download images and video from the camera onto your computer. Unfortunately, the MPT are not available for download for free from the Motorola website. So, check whether a CD came with your mobile phone which contains a copy of MPT which you can install. If not, you may need to purchase a copy of MPT from the Motorola Online Store (moto.brightpoint.com.au/motostore). However, before purchasing continue reading this answer as there may be another method. That said, before dealing with other methods if you have got a copy of MPT and installed this on your computer then you are almost ready to start downloading video from your mobile phone. Connect your phone to the computer and then start Motorola Phone Tools. Once the program loads it should be relatively straight-forward to download videos. On the left-hand side of the screen click the “Video Studio” button, a list of all videos on your mobile phone should appear. Select the videos you wish to save to your computer and then click the button with the Save icon (i.e. an icon that looks like a floppy disk) to save the videos to your computer. If you still encounter difficulties, visit the following website to view the full manual for MPT version 4: direct.motorola.com/HelloMoto/NSS/manuals/V9m/MPT4.asp . You will find the instructions for Video Studio (with screen shots) on page 97 of the manual.

If a copy of MPT did not come with your mobile phone, and you are hesitant to purchase a copy of this software, there may be another way around the issue. When you connect some devices to your computer via USB they appear as a new disk drive in My Computer and Windows Explorer. This allows you to directly navigate through the contents of the memory on your mobile phone and copy files (such as video files) to your computer. To test whether this will work, connect the mobile phone to your computer through USB and check whether any new drives appear within My Computer or Windows Explorer. If a new drive does appear, have a look to see what is contained on the drive. More than likely there will be a folder structure (which hopefully represents the memory contents of your mobile phone) and one of these folders may contain your videos. If so, copy the videos to another location on your computer and check whether they play. Do not modify the contents of your mobile phone’s memory, or delete any files directly from the phone, as you may accidentally delete important data or preferences which are being stored on the phone.