Best solution for this?

[amol]

I'm a college student and I want to get a TV for this next year for my room since neither me nor my new roommate has a TV. The only thing is that I don't think I'll have enough space in my room to keep a dedicated TV, so I was thinking of getting something to watch TV either on my MB Pro or on my external LCD monitor.

I was looking at EyeTV products and was wondering what people think of those. Does it make your computer run much slower? Also, is there any sort of external box I can use to connect through VGA to go directly to my monitor and bypass my computer?

 

[nsafreak]

Well I have a few ideas but which would be best for you would depend on your signal source:

1) If you plan on just using antenna. I would suggest an Echostar DTVPal converter box. Well reviewed, easy to use and it would be pretty easy to hook up to an external monitor provided you have either a DVI or HDMI input. If you have DVI available but no HDMI I would go with a HDMI to DVI cable from monoprice which you can get pretty cheap.

2) If you plan on hooking it up to cable I hope you understand that you'll only get the unscrambled QAM channels and nothing else. If that's the case then I would suggest looking at some of Hauppauge's USB or PCMCIA HDTV tuners. You'd hook these up to your laptop and then watch it on the laptop or possibly hook the laptop up to an external screen and watch it from there. Not sure if hooking it up to an external screen would work or not.