For some reason, the idea of watching TV on the PC has always appealed to me. Not only does it save having to buy a television, but it also saves the space, and adds functionality not found on a common television set. ATI's tuner solution has always provided sharp quality, despite a few driver caveats with earlier products like the TV Wonder.

We'd initially hoped for an integrated digital tuner, but unfortunately, ATI's DTV solution is still in the prototype phase, and not yet ready for production. Instead, the analog tuner included with the All-In-Wonder RADEON will have to suffice. With this proven technology comes a brand new list of features, though.

We start with a basic TV tuner, capable of scanning 125 different channels. All of the features previously found on the All-In-Wonder series, such as zoom, Hot Words advanced close captioning, panning and dbx stereo tuning are still available.

Additionally, ATI has added TV-ON-DEMAND, a technology that functions similarly to a Personal Digital Recorder. First, the user allocates a certain amount of hard drive space. Then, they configure the software to record at a given level of quality, depending on disk space available and desired image. When the phone rings, the mother-in-law pays a visit, or nature calls, pausing live TV is as simple as hitting the "Pause" button. ATI's software records in the background, so when you are ready to watch again, hit "Play." During commercials or those sappy parts in Top Gun, you can fast forward until the switch is made back over to the live broadcast.

To compliment the TV-ON-DEMAND feature, ATI has also included an interactive program guide, which provides complete program listings. This new software, called GUIDE+, will search and schedule programming based on title, category, actor or date, meaning you can schedule an episode of Friends (if you're into those types of shows) a week ahead of time and have your PC record it as an MPEG-2 file on your disk drive. According to ATI, a 5GB hard drive will hold seven hours of MPEG-1 quality video or three hours of MPEG-2. Since the quality of your recording will only be as good as the source, we've found MPEG-1 to be more than sufficient for recording from the TV.