It's easy to get "gizmo envy" if you've seen the latest generation of personal video recorders (PVRs) from ReplayTV or TiVo. These boxes act as sophisticated automated video recorders that use a hard drive instead of tape for storing video, and they have a raft of unique features.

But these stand-alone boxes are expensive and often hard to find because they're so popular. There is a lower-cost option: Assuming your PC has a decent-sized hard drive, you can turn it into a PVR by installing an add-in card and software.

PC PVRs let you easily browse and choose which TV shows to record on your PC's hard drive using an on-screen program guide. Also, they can pause a live show when you get interrupted and can then continue from where you stopped watching. PC PVRs can create transcripts from closed-captioning, or watch for certain phrases in the captioning and automatically start a recording. That's just the beginning. If you have a CD-RW drive or a recordable-DVD drive, you can even create your own classic TV show collection. You can also play back shows you've digitized and record them on a standard VCR.

The PC-based PVR arena hosts a wide variety of product choices, but we used a PVR-ready graphics card (the $195 ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500) as our example here. Matrox, VisionTek, and many others have similar products.

Two caveats: First, despite large differences in hardware requirements among different makes, figure on a minimum of a 750-MHz Pentium III, 256MB of RAM, and a large hard drive (40GB to 80GB) if you want to turn your PC into a PVR. Second, you might prefer an all-in-one solution that includes a TV-out jack so you can hook up a standard TV for viewing. Some TV-tuner cards lack that output.

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