Congrats!! I've *never* had xawtv lock up my computer though... I previously used by bttv card on a K6-2 350MHz, with no speed problems, but that also used overlay. Are you using a relatively recent kernel and xfree? PAL is definately *not* the setting you want, unless you hook up european or other non-US hardware to your machine; all our (national) signals are scanning at NTSC framerate. One thing I really appreciate about bttv is that you see the entire TV picture, whereas a lot of TV's have moulding around the edge of the screen... esp. noticable on channels like CNN headline news or CSPAN, which pack dynamic info around the edges of their broadcast. Even without overlay mode, though, I don't see why a 550MHz box would have *any* problems just watching the tuner... I could guess you're also running the folding@home client; if so try stopping that for a bit... I've noticed that it doesn't always throttle itself as nicely as I'd like; especially when doing something that spawns many processes (not that bttv does tho). Enjoy!
PS - Do your mobo have an AGP slot, Jamie? (2x/4x?) -- -- Ben Barrett Software & Systems Engineer counterclaim Phone: 541.484.9235 Fax: 541.484.9193
