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(More customer reviews)I have spent about a month evaluating the ATI TV Wonder HD 750, and I have to recommend that you do not buy it. It is not ready for prime time.
The device, first, consistently fails to be recognized at system start-up. I mean it does not even appear in the device manager. You have to yank it out of its USB port and plug it back in, each and every time you start your computer up. The boy at tech support with whom I spoke about this issue with the first of these I received was clueless as to the cause. He told me it must be defective device. Well, the second one Amazon sent me behaved in exactly the same way, so this is not a unit defect, but a design defect. This device is simply not compliant with the plug and play specification under Windows XP SP 3. I have to wonder how many times I can yank this out of the USB port to reinsert it before the port will begin to break down.
Then, even when the device is recognized under Windows, it completely fails to work with the Windows Media Center, which will not recognize it as a device designed to work in the United States. Nothing you do with the Windows Media Center will thereafter enable this device to be used there, even though Windows Media Center is supposed to be able to work with a TV tuner plugged into the system.
Now, on to the software they send with this device, ArcSoft Total Media 3.5.
This software is, in a word, garbage. It is the most inanely written piece of code I have ever encountered.
First, when initiated, it completely locks up your system, such that you cannot do anything in any other window when it is loading, which takes the better part of a minute or more.
The software always opens full screen, even if not desired. You cannot get it to open a nice, civilized window. It also always starts not with a TV screen, but with a menu of services, most of which you will never use. There is no way to set program run parameters to bypass any of this to go straight to your TV, even though that's what you want to do 99.9% of the time. (After all, if you had a TV on the wall, that's what you'd be doing, right?) So, each time you want to watch TV, you have to go through a series of steps to get to the right place in the software, to maximize the actual TV image within the software, and to size the software's window to your preferred size and location on your screen. You have to do this each and every time you watch TV. The software remembers almost nothing.
The little remote that comes with the device does not communicate effectively with the tuner half the time. It won't communicate with it at all if the software is not the active window on the desktop. Instead, whatever you put into the remote will start appearing in whatever application is the active window, including your browser. Try that with a TV remote!
The software's means of scanning and enrolling channels is extremely slow and cumbersome. When it finally stops, the channels found are not in numeric order, but are all jumbled up, so you have to go through a long process of reordering them manually, moving them up and down as ArcSoft requires of you. (Who would write software that doesn't automatically sort the scan results by channel number? Who would write software that doesn't at least have a "sort" function?)
Then you have go back and delete, one by one, all the foreign language channels, the home shopping channels, and the religious channels.
Then you realize that the scanner missed one or two of your favorite channels, so you think you'll reorient the antenna, and just manually add it.
WRONG! There is no manual adding of channels. The only way to try to add the channel(s) missed is to run through the entire scanning process all over again, which produces an unsorted channel listing, and adds back in all the channels you spent minutes deleting.
Who writes software which does not permit the manual addition of missed channels? These people at ArcSoft are complete amateurs. And remember that this is version 3.5. They've had more than enough time to get things right.
Also, when running, TotalMedia 3.5 takes up a huge amount of system resources, even with a fast CPU and 4 Gb of RAM. At least 160Mb RAM, and it will not run properly unless I go into Task Manager and increase its CPU priority to at least "Above Average."
This product and the software bundled with it are most definitely not ready for the market. I only bought it because I didn't want to have to spend the money on a TV to have in my office, which would take up more power and produce more heat, but given the piss-poor performance of the ATI TV Wonder HD 750 and ArcSoft Total Media 3.5, I may well return it and do just that.
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