Can you use a Nikon D40 for stop motion?

I have a nikon D40 DSLR camera, and I've had trouble hooking it up to my computer.
At the moment i can hook them up and take a photo which then shows up onscreen, whereas what i want is to be able to hook the camera up to my computer and run it through a program like iStopmotion or photo booth or anything like that, with a live feed coming straight from the camera lens to the computer screen.

Is this at all possible, or am i barking up the wrong tree using this camera?

You have a fine camera and if you wish to make time-laps videos with it, you will have to manually expose each frame. It this "push button" world that can become tedious, but that is the way animators did it for the past half century.

The Nikon D300 and more advanced Nikon Cameras have a built-in time laps feature. With it you can program up to 9999 timed shots.

Compiling those individual shots into a video may require a special program