Windows Vista by default has Windows Media Center as a part of the Vista core package. Although Windows Vista Media Center is capable of doing many things there is one thing in particular that I do often, watch live TV. I never had much of an interest in watching TV on my computer and was not a Vista user until my computer suffered a catastrophic failure. While in a hurry I bought a new tower begrudgingly with Windows Vista installed. The tower did not have a TV tuner installed and so my curiosity eventually got the best of me. After researching different TV tuner cards I settled on the Pinnacle HD Tuner card. Installing was a snap and in no time I was watching live TV on my PC. The down side of my new tuner was the Pinnacle TV Center Pro software did not run very smoothly on my PC.

Pinnacle TV Center Pro is undoubtedly a resource hog and requires serious processor usage. Even with minimal programs running along side with TV Center Pro it was unstable and choppy, often dropping out and freezing up. Frustrated with Windows Vista I realized that the problem lies within Pinnacle Systems software and not with Windows Vista. With 2.8 GHz AMD Processor and 2 gigabytes of memory I should have been able to run Live TV with little or no problems. I ultimately went back to the Windows Vista Media Center and found that I can multi task with several programs and not miss a beat on my Live TV. Media Center Live TV is capable of fetching your program guide and parental controls.

I am happy to say to the naysayers of Windows Vista that my Live TV performs great while multi tasking and out performs three other Live TV programs that I tested on my PC. One drawback is Windows Media Center does not support QAM (unencrypted HD signals).