I bought the nVidia FX5700 Personal Cinema video card because it was the cheapest TV Tuner and FM Tuner card, with 256mb of memory. I paid something like $250 for it.

I had problems from the beginning. Installing the driver on Windows XP was a pain (and it’s not supported on Linux, like they claim it is - one of the reasons I bought the card).

When I finally got the regular driver to work, I had ghosts on the screen, which was causing problems for me, turns out the cable was faulty, but with a KVM switch resolution degradation was still a problem (not so on my other two pc’s also connected to the KVM switch with different cards.

Another reason I bought it was so I could record tv. Which was I was not able to setup. I connected the cable tv feed and sound loop wire to the sound card, and then the RF signal receptor (for the remote), and when I installed the nVidia Forceware drivers, after going through the hassle of downloading the tv listings, etc. ….It said “no tv tuner detected”. I removed and re-installed several times, tried searching the nVidia forums (which by the way, are not very helpful). There literally is very little info as far as forums and technical documents out there related to this particular nVidia card, so I’m going to sell it on eBay and try an ATI card (which is supposed to have good Linux support) or buy a better nVidia card.

The setup was straight forward, and even using the CDs included with the eVGA nVidia FX5700 card, could not get the TV tuner to recognize. All I really got was an overpriced graphics card.

Another problem was that as soon as I connected the cable tv feed to the card, the monitor started flickering and getting “shaky”. This was unavoidable.

Incidently, this is the 2nd nVidia card I have purchased, the first one stopped working after about 3 months. I don’t know why I convinced myself this one would be any different.

So I’m quitting nicotine, my last dip was on January 2nd. It’s now saturday (the 8th), and tonight I broke down.

i forgot about the water thing someone told me about, where you drink water and it expands your lungs when you breath deeply giving you the same feeling as a drag from a cigarette. I went straight to the 7/11 and bought a pack of Turkish Royal camels (some new blue pack they came out with), my teeth grinding was becoming a nusance.

I took two puffs, started gagging a few times, and nearly puked on the sidewalk infront of the store (cigs taste like ashtrays now, which is a good thing). I tossed the pack, and went home, opted for a piece of nicorette.

They should have public executions of people who are in the nicotine delivery business.

I was looking for a replacement for Power Archiver (the once best archiver for windows), since they have now required licensing after 31 days (as does WinZip for Windows). After digging around, I found a slick little archiver app called 7-Zip, which supports all the major archive formats, written open source, under the LGPL license and has a clean interface.

Also, the recent release of the open source graphics program, Gimp 2.2 for Windows, makes Adobe Photoshop obsolete!! :-)

Gaim for Windows replaces Trillian and handles multiple accounts without merging lists - like trillian does :-(

FileZilla is the best gui ftp program that is open source for windows operating systems.

Of course, FireFox is the best browser out there, also open source and ported to Windows - checkout the Adblock toolbar.

Thus the last remaining reason to keep a windows computer around is Quicken, still the best of the best financial management software.