Hauppauge's WinTV Nova-S-USB2 is a USB device that gives access to satellite television channels through a computer – most notably over the newly launched BBC/ITV Freesat service.

In order to benefit from it, then, you'll need a satellite dish set up in your home, which needs to be wired directly to the hardware. Unfortunately this means either unplugging it from the Sky set-top box each time you want to use it, or picking up something called a satellite LNB, which will split the signal for you and is available for around £30 from Maplin and similar shops. If you don't have an existing dish, you can have one installed for around £80.

Following a short setup – through which the manual guides you – you can configure the software and drivers for your computer, and the first time you run the WinTV application you'll be asked to scan a satellite frequency to put together a list of channels.

This isn't a particularly easy process: the interface is very basic and the user isn't given much information on which satellite configuration to choose, though Sky Digital subscribers are given a particular one, which seemed to work for us as well.

Scanning for channels takes quite some time and the software doesn't respond very well or very quickly during the process so it's a case of sitting back and waiting with fingers crossed.

After about 30 minutes we had a full channel list with a total of 533 stations, though this also includes radio. From this point you can fire up the main application and start watching, which was around the same time we started encountering problems.

The notebook we ran the test on isn't top-of-the-range, but we'd expect it to cope fairly well, as it easily met the minimum specification listed for the product. Still it struggled at times to cope with a single video feed in full-screen mode. You'll need a pretty powerful computer, then, to get the kind of smooth operation you might expect, particularly if you expect to use the Surf feature to view multiple channels at once.

Without this, the only way to browse through and choose stations is through a very basic drop-down menu. With hundreds to choose from this is a particularly poor way of browsing around. You can enter keywords to filter the list down, but you’ll obviously need to know what you're looking for.

In terms of scheduling there's a simple utility that allows the user to select a channel from the list along with a time and date, to either fire up the software and start recording or to remind you that it's about to start. This, again, is very basic and is not well integrated into the WinTV suite.

Time-shift and recording is one area that does work well: it includes the ability to pause and rewind live broadcasts and it can record a programme direct to the computer's hard disk for later viewing. The software was pretty responsive for this, and recorded programmes are of good quality.

There's also a remote control that duplicates many of the functions of the software. It's fairly responsive and a worthwhile addition if you can get everything else running smoothly.

There isn't anything particularly wrong with the WinTV Nova-S kit, but the software leaves a lot to be desired, being rather unfriendly and awkward to browse, schedule or watch the wide range of channels available.

Vista compatible: Yes