I have a old pc and we have a sat dish hanging off the side of the house from a mysky installation. I was thinking of making use of the old pc and putting a dvb-s tuner card in it and use it for watching the free view channels, im not worried at this stage about recording. Just want something for a bit of experience before building a htpc when i have some spare money.

pc specs
CPU AMD athlon 1700+ 1.5ghz
RAM 255mb ddr
Motherboard MSI MS-6390
XP home

My tv has vga input so i am assuming i can just use that with vga out put of the motherboard.

I Have found a few cheep DVB-s pci cards on ebay with the specs below. From what i can work out this combination should work. Would appreciate if some one could let me know if im wasting my time or suggest a cheep dvb-s pci card.

any advice appreciated

• 
  Fully compliant with DVB-DATA ETSI / EN 301 192 standard
  
  


• 
  Fully compliant with supports DVB-S protocol ( EB 300 744 ) / MPEG-2
  
  


• 
  Support USB 2.0 Hi-Speed
  
  


• 
  Input frequency: 950MHz~2150 MHz
  
  


• 
  Symbol rate:2~ 45MS / s
  
  


• 
  Compliant with TCP / IP , UDP protocol
  
  


• 
  High-Speed data download with FTP , HTTP and SMTP protocol
  
  


• 
  Support for IP uncials and multicast
  
  


• 
  Support DiSEqC1.0 / 1.2 protocol
  
  


• 
  Max. 32PIDs can be decoded simultaneously
  
  


• 
  Support Electronic Program Guide
  
  


• 
  Support Multi-channel Recording
  
  


• 
  Support TS Stream Recording
  
  


• 
  Support Scheduler and Scheduler play
  
  


• 
  Support Patent lock
  
  


• 
  Support SDTV / HDTV
  
  


• 
  Support Real time Digital Video Recording ( DVR )
  
  


• 
  Support IR-Remote Controller
  
  


• 
  LNB Power Supply : 13 / 18 V <400mA
  
  


• 
  System Requirements:
  
  


• 
  IBM PC compatible : Pentium III 667MHz or higher
  
  


• 
  128MBytes memory or more
  
  


• 
  32MBytes display memory or more
  
  


• 
  Hard Disk free space of 500MBytes or more
  
  


• 
  OS supported: windows2000 for SP4 / Windows XP for SP2