To save space in my bedroom, I was thinking about buying one of those TV cards for the computer I'm building. Where you hook the TV cable into the back of the tower. What do I need to know about these and which one do I get?

As far as Must have programs, what do I need?

Windows XP Professional
Office Professional
Photoshop
Nero (Don't know where to get that though.)
Itunes
and???

Also, who makes the best "skin" program for windows? Thought I'd change it up a bit.

ATI TV Wonder VE.  A PCI card that cost about $40.00 usually has rebates also.

ATI also makes the ALL-IN-Wonder AGP cards which has an integrated tuner in the video card.

Newegg.com  

I have an ATI All-In-Wonder that suits me fine, though the audio volume on captured video is always lower than it should be, which introduces quite alot of hiss, regardless of which capturing software I use. It's a common complaint. Other than that, it's cool. I'm going to try it in a Linux box here in a week or so to see if there's any difference.

You can purchase Nero (good choice, btw) from www.nero.com

"Must have" programs varies among individuals, as I'm sure you can imagine. My Windows workstations typically resemble the following:

XP Pro - It ain't Fedora, but it'll do

Office 2003 Pro - the 'ol standby at work. I'd just as soon use OpenOffice, but I have an MSDN subscription and need Outlook for my Exchange server.

Nero - Favored by geeks the world over

Gimp - Photoshop is too damn expensive, and I use Gimp on my Linux boxen anyway

Winamp - who still intentionally uses Media Player, anyway?

Quicken - I wish GnuCash was this nice

FileZilla - Nice Open Source FTP client, supports FTP over SSL and SSH

FireFox - Also used on my linux machines. Tabbed browsing support alone is enough to switch from IE, nevermind security concerns

VNC  - For those customers who either use Linux, or don't have terminal services enabled on their win{2,3}k servers

3CDaemon - TFTP server primarily used for IOS upgrades on Cisco gear.

3CIPCalc - Because I can't subnet addresses in my head any quicker (ironic, considering my nick)

Cisco IP Communicator - Software equivalent of a 7970 IP Phone. Sweeeeeeeeet. Also used for
developing XML apps for the phone when I'm not near a hard phone

LDAP Browser 2.6 - Handy if I'm developing for an LDAP compliant-directory

mIRC - Rarely used in favor of an SSH session to a Linux box and bitchx

PuTTY - Sweet little SSH/Telnet/Rlogin app for Windows. This one sees almost constant use.

TeraTerm - Because using HyperTerminal while configuring routers sucks ass.

Gaim - I hate ads, I use it under Linux, and I don't care for having a bazillion apps installed just to talk with AIM/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/etc buddies.

Cisco VPN Client - Always good to have a tunnel to the office, home, or a few customer sites as need be.  Makes for a handy way to get the softphone working if I'm in a hotel room.

Visual Studio 2003 .NET - Customers really dig Windows apps. I'm not sure why, but they pay me to write 'em now and then, so...besides, I think C# is kind of nifty.

MySQL Control Center - Because I can't friggin' remember how to create/drop/alter tables or add users using the command line interface most of the time.

NuSphere PHPEd - A Godsend. I don't know how I wrote PHP apps without it. I also use it on my Linux machines.

Cisco CRA Editor - Used for developing call center workflows on Cisco IPCC (an IP based call center platform)

QuickTime/Real Alternative - I'll never install QuickTime or Real Player again. Don't need Media Player, either.

WinISO - Nice, easy way to create ISO images. (I wonder if mkisofs works under Cygwin)

VMWare Workstation - Running multiple operating systems at the same time rocks (how do they do that, anyway?). I could write for days singing the praises of this app. Also used on my Linux boxes. It's like, magic or something.  healthy
Mozilla Thunderbird - I like it better than Outlook Express and it manages my hundreds of identities well.

PowerQuest V2i Protector - Used for disaster recovery. I can take images (think Ghost) of my machine while Windows is running. Unbelievable. Even does incremental backups. Sweet! I can recover from a hard drive failure in less than 15 minutes. Worth every penny.

MapPoint - Now that it uses data from NavTech instead of those royalty-free Tiger maps provided by the Census Bureau, it's the only software I've ever found that accurately shows my position when my GPS receiver is connected.  Score one for Microsoft.

Ethereal - Occasionally, a really tricky problem at a customer site requires packet traces. It's also fun to study with. A few customers think you're some kind of God when you bust out with the sniffer.

XNews - By far, the coolest NNTP client for Windows. Free, too.

Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition - Necessary evil.

As far as I'm concerned, every one of these apps (except for mIRC) is a "Must Have".  I couldn't do my job without most of them, and I'd lose my sanity without the others To ammend your list, I might suggest FireFox and mIRC (think chat.ar15.com). Don't forget to have some decent AntiVirus software installed, and perhaps a copy of  some spyware/adware removal utility like AdAware. Your video card will no doubt come with all the software you need to watch TV, capture video, burn DVD's (if so equipped), etc. There are always alternatives if you don't like what they give you, bu I'm sure you'll be fine.

ive got the WIN TV-GO tv tuner card..........i tried 3 others all high dollar and everytime i tried to use them they crashed....so i get this one at office max for 40 bucks and with a little fine tuning this one works great....i watch tv,play poker and surf the net all at once with no problems or lock ups...what i found was that most tv tuner cards software was based around windows 98.......even the new ones....so it takes some playing with the settings to get one to work well with XP.

I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 card.  It seems fairly well supported under most OS's (if you want to use Windows or Linux), and includes onboard processing (with varying support by software) to lighten the burden on the CPU.  Comes with a remote, stereo sound, tuner, and composite and S-video in and out.  Software seems okay, but the software support on the website and SW updates seems kinda shady.