You get what you pay for

I bought the MSI Personal Cinema video card + tv tuner about 2 weeks ago. I used to have on-board video and an old ATI tuner card with no remote control. I thought the MSI card would be a nice little upgrade for better 3D and TV, and would also free up 64MB of RAM. At C$90, it sounds like a worthwhile investment.

Browsing through the driver CD, I saw the files were dated all the way back to 2003, which didn't inspire a lot confidence. A quick search on NVidia's web site I found the latest drivers for the card and installed them. The remote control only works with the WinDVR 2 that came on the CD so I had no choice but to install that. There were a few hiccups but I got WinDVR to work and I was able to watch TV (and I now have a very nice refresh rate on the 3D aquarium screensaver at 1920x1200x32). That could've been the end of the adventure except when I tried the timeshifting function (pause/rewind/fast forward live TV), WinDVR went crackidee-crash. Like an ignorant end-user I popped in the driver CD hoping to rectify the problem (don't know what came over me lately: installing outdated drivers and clicking "Yes" when the autorun of my Norah Jones CD popped up and all.)

Sure enough, it took me almost a day to get my desktop GUI back after the driver installation rebooted my machine. Windows wouldn't start up because of an error loading a DLL, and I couldn't run XP in safe mode because my wireless keyboard doesn't work in the screen where you select the Windows startup mode. I had to borrow an antique keyboard from work in order to go into Safe mode. After hours of installing, uninstalling, rebooting and swearing in 6 different languages, I settled for the configuration I had a paragraph ago (and without timeshifting).

Tonight I'm going to plug my computer into the UPS because WinDVR(and the computer) would freeze for like 10 seconds sometimes when the air conditioning comes on. Looks like a minor power surge issue, hope the UPS will fix the problem.