TV and Laptop: Together at Last!

"More modern notebooks may experience better luck, but both recording and time shifting wound up working acceptably given the right settings. Recordings could not be set to the highest level, as the system just could not keep up. Selecting a lower resolution and a lower bit rate format eliminated most of the issues I experienced at the higher quality settings. At some higher settings you could hear the processor fan working overtime as the base of the unit become noticeably warmer. Additionally, there were dropped frames and after some time there was generally a sync issue between the io and video. Dropping the settings down significantly resulted in degraded recordings (perhaps similar to an older VHS tape), but at least the system didn't struggle and the entire recordings were enjoyable. The same can be said of time shifting... High settings proved to be too much for this notebook. Selecting "Good" was about as good as it got for the tests executed.

For use on a notebook computer, I was more interested in watching TV than recording, so overall I was fairly happy with the end results. The AVerTV Cardbus TV tuner proved to be highly capable as a TV tuner, and allowed for adequate recording functions that could obviously be improved simply given a system with stronger specifications."

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