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A tuner can merge your TV with your PC By Greg Wright, Gannett News Service You've tried Web surfing, Web chatting, maybe even Webcamming. How about telewebbing?

Telewebbing is the ultimate pastime for couch potatoes. If that's you, you watch television in one corner of the PC monitor and surf the Net in another. A device, called a TV tuner card or adapter, which most home computer users can install in an hour, is all that's required, according to some experts.

Telewebbing has a global following.

Alan Collier of London, England, is one fan who installed a TV tuner card in his PC five years ago because his college dorm room was too cramped for both appliances. Now Collier runs the www.tv-cards.com news and advice Web site.

Eight time zones away in San Diego, Ruel Hernandez launched http://ruel.net, yet another telewebbing fan site. "I knew I had to have a TV tuner card when I was at a friend's house and saw (ice skater) Kristi Yamaguchi skating on a PC monitor screen," Hernandez said.

Telewebbing merges computing and watching TV. If you're a football fanatic, you can watch Monday Night Football on one side of your monitor and get play-by-play game statistics on the other from the ABC Web site.

Couldn't wait to gossip about the finale of Survivor: The Australian Outback? With a TV tuner card you didn't have to. Television devotees can watch the program while commenting on the action in chat rooms or by instant messaging.

TV tuner cards, which cost between $100 and $300, do more than just deliver television on the PC.

Some cards have features similar to the more expensive TiVo digital video recorder, allowing users to store programs on their PC's hard drive and pause live TV action while running to the kitchen for a snack. It's also easy to connect a DVD or VCR to a TV tuner card to watch movies or transfer home video clips to e-mail or a personal Web page.

Choosing a TV tuner card

Several TV tuner card types are available. Here are points to consider when shopping for one.

• Installation: Some TV tuner cards snap into one of the computer's internal "slot" connectors, either a PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slot or the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot. This requires opening the computer's case with a screwdriver. For less handy types, plug-and-play TV tuner cards are available that connect to the PC's Universal Serial Bus (USB) port, though these cards lack some of the features of the internal cards.

• Minimum requirements: Your PC should have a lot of storage space and processing power, especially to do TiVo-like functions. For instance, a $230 Marvel G450 eTV tuner card from Matrox requires a PC with at least 128 megabytes of RAM, a 600 megahertz or better processor and 2 gigabytes of free hard disk space, Matrox spokesman Sebastian Macdougall said.

• Monitor compatibility: Select a TV tuner that has a frequency rate that's as great or greater than your PC's monitor. Frequency rate measures how often the TV tuner card and monitor refresh the image on the screen, measured in hertz or cycles per second. A 75 hertz TV tuner refreshes the image 75 times per second. Most new monitors are compatible with 75 to 85 hertz TV tuners, said Blair Birmingham, a product manager at ATI Technologies, another TV card maker.

Extras: Some TV tuners can zoom, or enlarge the TV image, and offer different television window sizes on the monitor. Others are dual head, allowing users to put TV images on more than one monitor or follow a video game from two different angles on the same monitor. Users also may want models with remote controls to change channels from a distance.