I have found a perfect solution for the road warrior who wants the ability to watch or record television - the [1] Pinnacle HD Pro tuner. This tuner is tiny, yet includes a collapsible antenna and a remote control. It takes up very little space in the laptop bag, so it’s always available. It can pull in both over-the-air HD channels and analog channels (until the end of 2008, at least).

The tuner comes with its own software, and it can also be used from Media Center. While my laptop is fairly powerful, I never had good luck with this tuner in Media Center. Media Center only saw two channels, and they never came in very good. The Pinnacle software sees all the channels, and delivers most of them glitch-free. The only issue I ran into was a permissions issue where I needed to mark the Pinnacle software as “Run as administrator” in the Properties dialog. This seems to work fine in regular Vista but in my case, I had turned off the User Account Control and this affected the Pinnacle software.

Pinnacle’s MSRP for this product is $99.99, but you can get it for $79.99 at [2] Newegg.