New PC PVR user has some questions

[Kyrano]

I'm looking to set up my son's computer to record and watch cable TV in his room. It's an old P3-650, 256mb RAM, Win98SE, TNT2 32mb video card, 20gb HD, 19" Trinitron monitor, and connected on my home LAN. I do not want to upgrade his OS because the games he plays are more stable in 98SE than XP. He's only 5, so most of the games are older, and for whatever reason they don't behave well on either of my other two computers (both XP machines).

So what I'm thinking is to install a tuner (Hauppauge 150/250 or ATI Theater 550), 2nd HD, and SageTV in my primary computer (3.0Ghz, 1gb RAM, 6800 GTO), then install SageTV Client and on his P3-650.

I have 3 questions about all this:

1) Will the SageTV Client work okay on his system? I know it meets the minimum system requirements, but I'd like some feedback from someone who's used it on a similarly configured system.

2) Does anyone have any first hand knowledge of whether the image quality difference between the Hauppauge 150/250 and a Theater 550 card would be noticeable on a 19" monitor (full screen or windowed)?

3) What performance hit can I expect on my primary when my son's computer is watching a recorded video hosted on my primary computer, AND SageTV is recording a show? I play games on this computer (JumpGate, Aces High, World of Warcraft), and don't expect to be playing while he's watching or recording. But would it possible anyway?

[Crashless]

I can't attest to how well your particular client will work, but I bet if you run things at a low resolution (800x600 or even 640x480) you'll be fine. I run the client on my laptop PIII400,256, and it is 'acceptable'. Which basically means, it runs, and plays fine. YMMV.

I've never used the Theater 550, but I have to recommend the hauppauge cards if for no other reason than the very low CPU requirements when recording. My 2500+ sits around 10-20% usage when recording 3 channels at once, and I routinely play Doom3 while recording, and never have problems. I do mitigate the risk by upping the priority on the SageTV process though.

[dajota]

1) I have successfully ran the sagetv client on a P3-533 at 800x600. I have 572 mb ram and running on a clean XP pro. No norton, no other junk running in the Background. With Win98 you may run into problems due to poor memory management. Also, It might be worth noting I was not able to get a workable setup until I upgraded JAVA. Before that it was so slow it was unusable.

You might want to think setting up dual boot if you run into problems...put win2k on the another partition/harddrive for internet/office/PVR duties, leave the win98 partition for games. You might find the win2k works fine for the games that might be finicky under xp. (thats what i did before feeling I had enough memory to run XP)

2) I use a Win-Pvr250. looks like garbage on a 21" monitor at 1600x1200 full screen . Not so bad in a window or if I bump the res. down. It also really depends on your source signal.

3) never tried this one..cant see how it would be a problem.