A few weeks ago I jumped into the murky waters of the world of HDTV with the express intention of being able to hook a PC up to the television so I could watch movies and play MP3's. I also had this grand notion of being able to cable my satellite receiver directly into the PC using a tuner-card and having one interface to rule them all. I think the idea was pretty solid. I bought a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse to hook up to my IBM S50, which in turn is connected to my 42" Insignia television.
The S50 has a dual-core 2.2Ghz Pentium 4 processor... and a gig of ram... and an nVidia video card, yet the video output from the Pinnacle card is unreliable at best. If you make the video full screen, or just drag the window around, its like you've just asked the computer to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question (about life, the universe and everything.) SLOW. I couldn't believe it.
So, I did some reading of reviews. Apparently, I'm not the only person who's had this problem with the PCTV card. It is, in fact, quite common. Now, ordinarily I'd write this off as being symptomatic of infant technology, but I know this ISN'T infant tech because a good friend of mine was doing this back in 1999 on an AMD K62!!! This is a classic case of a crappy product.
Unfortunately for me, I don't really want to spend the extra $50 to go to a better video input card, so I just returned it to Best Lies/Buy and that's that. I'll take the coin I had tagged for that card and buy a two-port KVM so I can get 'vicious' back on-line.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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