I assume your current system and Ti4200 vid card meets all your current
needs, with the exception of the TV tuner.

You COULD get an 9600AIW or 9800 AIW, if you want to upgrade your video
card, but it sounds like your current video card is more than adequate.

You could get an ATI TV Wonder if you have a spare PCI slot. This would
allow you to watch TV in a window or as a full screen overlay.

ATI used to make a USB TV Tuner but it's listed as a discontinued product
now. If I were getting a TV Tuner, I'd want a USB 2.0 one that I could
move to any computer easily. That's just me.

Happague has been making TV tuners for a long time so I think they are
worth checking out too. http://www.hauppauge.com

I think the cheap way to go is get a PCI or USB tv tuner for now, then
when you are ready to buy your new PC,then decide on a video card based
on what's available then. It's bound to change. And you can just hook
up your usb or pci vid card in the mean time.




RoamDog wrote in
:

Need your input. I would like to install a TV tuner in my PC. Should
I get a separate tuner card or a combo video/tuner card. My current
video card is probably good enough to meet my needs but there do seem
to be some good deals on AIW cards this week that would also upgrade
my video.

I use my machine for
60% business apps (MS Excel, MS Powerpoint, MS Money and slightly more
graphic-intensive stuff like MS Visio, Photosuite, Windows Media
Player). 20% strategy games (Galactic Civilizations, Warcraft3, Alpha
Centauri, Rise of Nations, RR Tycoon, RollerCoaster Tycoon) 15% web
surfing and newsgroup reading 03% first-person shooters
01% tools (Norton, Spybot, ZoneAlarm, etc.)
01% tinkering around with learning/using Linux
Obviously, I will be adding watching TV/DVDs to the list after I get
the TV tuner card so the %s might change a bit.

So, as you can see I really do not *need* to have the absolutely
top-of-the-line card. But I do want to get the TV tuner up and
running and want to get the best bang for the buck in the video card
department (which could mean keeping my existing video card, although
the urge to upgrade, even just a little, is strong).


As-Is environment:
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X
ViewSonic E790 monitor
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Mobo: ASUS A7V8X REV 1.xx (Bus Clock: 133 MHz)
BIOS: Award Revision 1006 09/13/2002
Windows 98 SE
2 X 256 PC2700 Installed Memory
One Memory Socket is Empty
194.15 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
162.93 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space