(c) Pay too much.

(d) All of the above.

And my hope is that I can help a couple of you fine folks out there in the process of sharing my mini-rant with you.

What I have in common with some 13 million (according to Microsoft) other people: Thus far we've avoided the cable-provided tuner boxes like the plague. TiVo and ReplayTV were good; but I found the Media Center interface clean and easy to organize, and I've been a fan of the additional features that have accumulated over the years. I'm talking everything from simply streaming TV to my Xbox and Internet TV to the recent addition of Netflix to the app. I took it for granted, too; my Costco-flavor HP desktop handled the job just fine. As the years went by, I added more digital tuners (one ATSC jack, one analog cable jack--I was thinking "ahead"). I just plugged the cables into the computer, and I was all set.