i run windows vista with a couple of over the air HD cards from Hauppauge.
Do the Hauppauge cards have onboard MPEG processing, or do they dump all processing over to the PC's CPU?
I have an old Dell GX260 with XP, 1 GB RAM , nVidia GeForce AGP graphics card, and a MyHD MDP-130 OTA tuner card. The MyHD card has an on-board MPEG processor, so the PC does not get bogged down when watching/recording HD content. Unfortunately, this card doesn't have active software support anymore. With the nVidia PureVideo driver, this old thing can play 1080i transport streams quite well with Windows Media player. I can also play back using the MyHD card, which has a wonderful on-board MPEG II decoder, but the MyHD software is cumbersome.
Unfortunately, my old baby doesn't have a prayer for BlueRay content, so I suppose an upgrade is coming somewhere down the line...