Re: Nebula TV Card vs USB Box?

["kevsley" <knm@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry for the late response, but it might still be relevant...

>So - I'm happy with the PCI version - anyone any experiences of the
>USB version?

I've had the USB version of the Nebula for almost a year. The
reception seems to be very good with a decent aerial, and I'm very
happy with the DigiTV software (especially after coming from
Hauppauge).

However, I've had no-end of problems with the USB connection. The
Nebula requires USB 2.0, but my Dell Latitude C640 only has USB 1.1
support. Therefore, the only option was to use a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card,
the first of which was a cheap no-name card that didn't work with the
Nebula at all. I then purchased a Belkin card as recommended by
Nebula which did work, but not reliably.

The first thing to mention is that the USB 2.0 card needs to be
externally-powered for it to work with the Nebula which is extremely
annoying. Secondly, Windows XP quite often doesn't recognise the
Nebula after it's plugged-in, and it appears the only option is to
reinstall the drivers. Thirdly, you can only run the DigiTV
application for about 30 minutes before appears to lose contact with
the Nebula and then crashes.

Given that no-one else seems to have reported similar problems, I can
only assume that there's some fundamental incompatibility with the
Dell Latitude and/or its USB support. However, it's something to be
aware of.

Regards,

Kevin Meynell