Considering it's available for around £85 (if you're willing to shop around), Hauppauge's WinTV-PVR 150 isn't a bad way to take your place on the media centre bandwagon. This particular vehicle bundles in a remote control, an infra-red receiver, a PCI WinTV card and assorted software.

And it's fairly simple to get working. While some will naturally prefer an external USB solution, there's little trouble in locating an empty PCI slot inside your PC and attaching the WinTV device. Once we'd done that and popped the case back on our test computer, Windows XP happily detected the presence of the card with little protest. The card was also compact enough to fit inside our Shuttle-based test rig.

The first delay in the whole installation process is getting all of the software that Hauppauge included in the box up and running. As well as NanoPEG Editor (for editing MPEG files), there's a special (read: slightly stripped down) edition of Ulead's fine MovieFactory 3, and Hauppauge's own WinTV Scheduler and Edit.

The Scheduler is probably the pick of the software, as it allows you to schedule the television programmes you want to record over the course of a week, and can then be left to its own devices to do so. You can edit them and output them onto disc at your leisure.

Once everything was in place, the picking up of both analogue and digital transmission signals was a straightforward task, and while it takes a little while to undertake a full channel search - in much the same way as it does when setting up a new television for the first time - it's a job that theoretically only needs to be done once.

Once everything was found, the reception quality was good and the package barely caused us any bother from that point onwards. Recordings were smooth and the bundled software covered a good selection of bases considering the fairly low retail cost.

To get to that cost, there are a couple of corners that have been cut. The most significant? That the box is strangely bereft of cabling, meaning that to take advantage of the varied audio and video outputs and inputs you need to supply the leads yourself. For some this is going to be a sizeable and unwise omission. Some may also wish for the inclusion of FM radio support if they're looking for a media centre-style addition to their PC.

Still, as a modest cost way of turning a bog-standard PC into something media-capable, the WinTV-PVR 150 is more than adequate. Granted, it takes a little time to get up and running, but it does what it says it will, with relatively little fuss. And while it might not match the outright quality of similar products with price tags double what's being asked for here, it's hard to grumble that you don't get decent value.

This is a perfectly competent TV receiver package, albeit with a little corner-cutting in the connection leads department.