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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Daniel @ Nov 28th 2005 7:43PM
I'm sorry, but the HDTV Wonder card is so bad, I would rather deal with standard definition television than go through the frustration that is the HDTV Wonder.
The thing ate up so much processor power that I could not watch a show and record another at the same time on my Athlon 2700+ system. Their drivers are locked down by some proprietary encryption to make sure you don't somehow unlock their bundled DVD-decoder. It was so unstable (until the most recent drivers), that I could not sit through a show without the picture freezing, which required me to kill the TV application and bring it back. I never got it to recognize that my harddisk was DMA-enabled, which meant that it would put up an annoying dialog box every time (they had a checkbox that said "don't show me again" which did not work, no matter how many times you click it). This would just be an annoyance, except a user had to click it so it would start recording from the timer--so I couldn't record anything while away from my computer. I went through 2-dozen reinstalls with different versions of my motherboard, video card, and HDTV wonder drivers to try to get it to work, and even replaced my GeForce Ti4200 with a Radeon 9600 with no effect.
I eventually bit the bullet and bought a Sony DHG HDD-250 for $699 and left my computer to gaming. This worked beautifully. It only has one tuner, but I don't miss having two since I can watch a recorded program while another is being recorded. I would reccommend anyone looking to use their computer as an OTA HDTV DVR to go this route instead of attempting to build one. If you are using cable or satellite, just go with your provider's box.