I usually write about the latest and greatest electronics gear, but this week, I'm going retro. It all started when my wife said she wanted to watch TV while working out on her stepper, an at-home version of a health-club StairMaster. My first impulse was to run over to Best Buy and pick up a small LCD TV, one of those thin 15- or 17-inchers that I could set on a desk or mount on the wall. That was the plan--until I remembered I had an old 15-inch LCD computer monitor in storage. It's been gathering dust in a closet ever since its companion Pentium II PC was donated to charity. I thought, hey, why not save a few bucks and turn this relic into a cutting-edge TV? There had to be a way.

	TVBox 9

I didn't have to look far. After a little digging, I came across AVerMedia, a company that recently began selling the exact device I was looking for: the TVBox 9. As the name implies, it's a small breakout box, an external TV tuner that sits outside your monitor and essentially duplicates the A/V input ports you'd find on the back of any standard TV. With a cost of around $150 online, the TVBox 9 still left me $350 to $450 ahead of the game, considering a 15-inch Sharp Aquos runs somewhere between $500 and $600.

The good news is that the TVBox 9 lives up to its advertised claims. Within minutes of pulling it out of the box, I was viewing basic cable and flipping through channels with the included remote. Because the box has a pass-through VGA port for your PC, you can use the PIP (picture-in-picture) function to watch TV while you work on your computer. You could also hook up a DVD player, a video game system, or a digital cable or satellite box via the box's S-Video input. The TVBox 9 even offers such sophisticated DVD compatibility options as progressive-scan component-video inputs and 2:3 pull-down video processing. Just don't expect the same sort of all-encompassing connectivity options you'd get from an A/V receiver.

The only rub: In my haste to beat the system, I forgot that my LCD didn't have a built-in sound system, so I had to dig out some old PC speakers to get any noise. In the end, it wasn't the tidiest-looking setup, but it was industrial chic in a downtown, urban sort of way, and the picture was as good--and by good, I mean OK--as the ones I've seen on the flat-screen TVs at the gym. Cosmetically, it was no Aquos, and my wife suggested the whole thing would look better "if there weren't all those wires." Regardless, I had just converted a six-year-old PC monitor into a thin-screen TV for a relatively small investment in both time and money.

More-sophisticated options
AVerMedia's TVBox 9 and the less expensive TVBox 5 ($99) are among the simplest TV-tuner solutions out there. But as anybody who's thought about it or is already viewing television on a computer monitor might know, there are plenty of options to help convert an LCD into a TV. If you have an interest in this sort of marriage and aren't angling for a Media Center PC, here's a quick rundown of some of the better choices.

Laptop solutions
Yes, laptops have LCDs, too, but they lack PCI slots for adding TV-tuner/video-capture cards. You'll have to go with an external USB device that allows you to both watch TV on your PC and capture video to your hard drive; from there, you can burn the footage to CDs or DVDs. For bandwidth reasons, we recommend adding USB 2.0 to your computer and purchasing a USB 2.0 breakout box such as the ones mentioned here.

Adaptec's VideOh DVD Media Center USB 2.0 Edition ($199), AVerMedia's UltraTV USB 300 ($130), and Hauppauge's WinTV-PVR USB2 ($199) are all compact external units that double as TV tuners and video-capture cards. Additionally, when combined with their respective software bundles, they offer DVR (digital video recorder, also known as PVR) functionality. These solutions are also compatible with SnapStream's Beyond TV 3.0 software ($60), which does a decent TiVo imitation without a monthly fee. One word of caution: The software-based encoding solutions (such as the UltraTV USB 300) and the TV-recording functions of the SnapStream software require some serious computing power, so be sure to check the minimum system requirements, and don't expect to multitask much while you're watching Friends.

Desktop solutions
While all of the aforementioned USB products will work with desktops, the respective manufacturers also put out internal, PCI-card-based TV-tuner/video-capture tools that deliver the same features as their breakout box cousins. Another solution to consider is stepping up to one of ATI's All-in-Wonder cards, particularly if you're considering upgrading your graphics card anyway. Nvidia's Personal Cinema line is also a good choice, but ATI has been at the TV-tuner/video-capture game longer and has arguably the more mature software.

Mac users, we didn't forget you, but there isn't a whole lot out of good stuff out there. Still, we like Miglia's $130 Alchemy TV PVR, a PCI-based board that works with G4 and G5 systems. Miglia is in the process of upgrading its PVR software and will soon have a new version that adds features and improves the interface.

Got any views on the subject? Let me know what you think.