Avermedia AverTV Go 007 FM review

Electronics stores may be full of LCD TVs, but they're very expensive.

However, if you have a flat-panel monitor, you can convert it into a TV in minutes by adding a TV tuner card like the AverTV Go 007 FM to your PC.

Installation is easy - fit the card into a free PC I slot in your computer, and the hard part is over. When you turn your computer back on, Windows XP will detect the card and automatically load all the drivers from the CD to make it work. You can then install the TV- viewing software, plug in your aerial lead, and you're ready to go.

Tuning in the card's channels is equally straightforward. The auto-scan feature will search every available channel for you, so all you have to do is identify which picture is from which channel and sort them into the right order. When sorting the channels, the channel list didn't update quickly enough, leading to odd glitches in the list displayed. Even so, it was easy enough to do.

The 007's remote control is small and sturdy, though its batteries do rattle inside in a slightly annoying fashion. Even more annoyingly, the buttons for moving up and down a channel didn't do what we expected - if we pushed 'up' when watching BBC1, for example, it changed to a random, empty channel rather than to BBC2. This could be a pain if you're a hardened channel surfer, but we found it easy enough to select channels using the 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 buttons instead.

Picture quality is generally good. The card's de-interlacing successfully smoothes out jagged edges that would otherwise appear as a result of the fact that TV signals are designed for conventional televisions, which each second only update every every other line of dots in the picture, rather than every line as on a PC monitor.

It's easy to flick between watching TV in a window and on the full screen, and simple to record a show - just push the Record button. Don't expect to watch and record at the same time, though - picture quality on-screen is drastically reduced when recording.

The time shift function allows you to pause the TV if you need to step away for a few minutes. It generally works well, although we did find that you lose the first half-second or so of the broadcast.

The AverTV Go is a decent TV tuner that's well-priced and easy to use, but the problem with changing up and down channels prevented it from getting an award. We'd still go for Leadtek's WinFast TV2000 XP Expert instead.