You're already paying your cable company a monthly fee for the TV you watch. Why should you pay them for a cable box as well? Good news: You don't have to. Using a TV tuner card that supports QAM, the technical name for the video signal your cable provider supplies, you can plug the cable feed directly into your computer—and return that box. Nearly all cable providers transmit the major networks unscrambled, often called "clear QAM," though you'll need a CableCARD-based PC to receive the encrypted, premium channels. The newest card from Hauppauge Computer Works, the WinTV-HVR-2250 ($129 direct) has two high-quality tuners, to bring a world of high-def goodness to your PC. No cable box required.

The Win-TV-HVR-2250 does everything short of unscrambling Cinemax. It features two hybrid digital tuners—hybrid because they can decode several different types of signals. Each NXP TDA18271HD tuner chip can decode NTSC, ATSC, and clear Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) signals. Because Vista doesn't support QAM (yet), Hauppauge has written a special plug-in that lets its cards decode those signals.

Installing the HVR-2250 in my Vista-equipped Dell Dimension 9100 desktop was a breeze. It's a PCI Express x1 card, but the card will function just fine in the more common x16 slot you might see on your motherboard—you'll recognize it as the type of interface your graphics card probably uses. I plugged the card into a free x1 slot, sealed my PC back up, and rebooted.

After installing the drivers from the included disc, I set up the new tuners in Windows Media Center. My PC automatically detected the HD-DVR 2250's tuners and started the signal wizard, but you can also start it manually by navigating to Settings |TV | Set up TV signal. Here's the trick: I used the wizard to configure the tuners as if they were ATSC antennas; then I ran the QAM plug-in, which detected the 20 or so unencrypted channels Cablevision broadcasts in Brooklyn, New York. Video quality was crisp and clear, and the sound was sharp too.

Other tuner cards, such as the AVerMedia AVerTV Bravo Hybrid PCI-E card, use a software encoder when watching certain types of media, which forces the CPU to do the heavy lifting. Mainstream PCs won't have any problem handling that work, but don't count on doing anything else with your PC at 8 p.m. while Lost is recording. And indeed, in my testing the Hauppauge card performed just fine, while the AVerMedia card dropped a few frames here and there.

The HVR-2250 comes bundled with version 6 of Hauppauge's WinTV application, for watching TV with Windows XP and Vista. It has similar functionality to Windows Media Center, allowing users to watch, pause, or record analog or digital TV on their PC screen. The card also works with other popular DVR applications, such as Snapstream. But WinTV is hardly as polished as Windows Media Center.

Ignore the bundled app, however. Use it with Windows Media Center for the ultimate home-theater PC experience. Affordable, powerful, and future-proof, the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 is the gold standard for tuners.

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