Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 - Multimedia Performance Profile

Multimedia Interacting: TV Viewing How does TV fit into the picture?

TV Tuner – We just happen to have one of Dell's newly minted "Dell" tuners. This is similar to other USB tuners of the past: RF input, S-video input, RCA port (video in, L and R audio), and USB output. You can read more here.

TV Hookup – The same design problem that the remote base faces also looms over the TV hookup design. Ideally, an external TV tuner would not be necessary. However for the moment, there are no other practical alternatives. Some people will not want this component, while some will. Additionally, creation of a high quality small TV tuner that can easily be plugged in is limited by the current technology.

Watching & Recording TV - Regardless of what quality setting used in recording video, we were looking at about 40% to 70% CPU usage (this also goes for watching TV). This is due to the encoding needs of MCE. Remember that our XPS G2 system came with a 2.13GHz Pentium-M.

Cables - With TV hookup, at minimum you are going to have 4 cables running near your notebook: RF cable for TV Tuner, USB cable from TV Tuner to notebook, USB cable from remote base to notebook, and power cable. We would recommend using the USB ports on the back of the notebook, because this prevents the cables from getting in your way if you swap out discs, DVD or otherwise. Make that 5 if you are hooking up an external display.

Multiple DVD Discs - Archiving of TV shows can be done, but if you are trying to archive shows recorded from MCE 2005, you can use the remote to control archiving. You won't have to get up, minus swapping in and out DVD+-R (s) or CD-R(s).