I'm so shallow. Show me a product priced below its predecessor and I yawn. Show me one with higher performance and I grunt. Show me one with alpha blending and I go, "Ooh! Pretty!"

That's how I spent the next-to-last afternoon before the epic, epochal launch of Microsoft Windows XP. (No, I'm not going to repeat deflating comments from analysts about how the debut of Win XP will be underwhelming, not a significant boost to the PC industry or a big deal like Win 95 was. Minnesota Twins third baseman Corey Koskie will be at the Best Buy store in Richfield tomorrow, and one lucky customer will win a copy of XP signed by Bill Gates. CompUSA says its Windows XP pre-order program was the most successful in its history, although that may have been because customers who prebooked their $100 upgrades received a $500 bundle of other software, free installation and training, discounts on memory and hard disk purchases, and an airline companion ticket.)

But back to alpha blending, which for any nongeeks reading refers to the use of a fourth channel for video display data, specifying levels of opacity as well as red, green, and blue: The product demo I was attending was for ATI Technologies' All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500DV, the latest generation of watch-TV-on-your-PC graphics cards.

Such products have been around for years yet left me cold, no matter how often I've been told, "You can have CNN in a corner of the screen while working in Word or Excel!" It's a hassle to have the cable company run a cable to your office to plug into a TV tuner card, in addition to the cable in the family room for the TV. Your PC monitor is smaller than your TV, even before devoting part of your workspace to a TV window. And all-in-one cards have always lagged behind 3D graphics cards when it comes to gaming performance.

So when the ATI marketing guy popped up a live CNN window over the Windows desktop, I nodded politely. But then he clicked on a control and made it translucent, then transparent, and I goggled: Alpha blending! Use the whole screen to work with only a ghostly newscaster in the background, until a story comes up that you want to see in full focus!

That's a reason to tune Windows' display settings to a 32- rather than 24-bits-per-pixel palette. And the All-in-Wonder won't wimp out with games, since it uses the new 64MB DDR Radeon 8500 chip that's challenging Nvidia's GeForce family for the 3D speed crown (falling just a bit short, according to early tests, but still quite competitive even as ATI vows to improve its historically second-rate software drivers).

Something Buyers Haven't Seen Before

And the TV tuners I snubbed years ago couldn't do Tivo-type time-shifting or personal-video-recorder stuff like pausing live broadcasts or recording shows to your hard disk for later transfer to one of today's DVD burners. Nor did they provide handy GemStar program listings and one-click scheduled recording, or five input (including FireWire for DV camcorder editing) and five output jacks on a sensible dongle instead of a tangled mess of cords plugged into the card itself.

By the time the ATI rep pointed out that you could route your single cable input to the PC, run an S-Video cable from there to the big-screen TV in the next room, and sit in front of the latter using the All-in-Wonder's radio-frequency, 40-foot-range remote control, I was thinking about PC/TV convergence more favorably than I had in five years.

I was also wondering if home entertainment might indeed prove a partial cure for the industry's low-sales, low-margins PC blues. No question, things are tough out there; yesterday Compaq announced third-quarter losses of a cool half-billion. True, three-quarters of that was its investment in dot-com incubator CMGI (gee, doesn't that Internet boom seem like a lifetime ago?), but Compaq's PC division lost $248 million as revenue fell 42 percent -- and, by Goldman Sachs's guess, consumer PC sales halved -- from a year ago.

And as long as consumers think a home PC is just for homework, Web surfing, and e-mail, they won't need new hardware; they won't benefit much from Windows XP; and PC vendors will continue frantically and fruitlessly slashing the prices of their same old beige boxes -- often by using bottom-of-the-barrel parts like the slow integrated graphics chips or ancient Nvidia Vanta cards included with some brand-new, just-announced HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario desktops.

But the All-in-Wonder 8500DV will sell for something under $500. Adding a DVD-R or, better, DVD+RW drive to your Presario or Pavilion, so you can convert your closetful of VHS tapes to a slim shelf of discs, will add $400 to $500. Vendors get fatter margins; consumers get new functionality. It'll be a tough sell -- nobody's throwing around dough in this economy -- but I'd think it would be easier than persuading folks to buy basically the same PC they have now with a slightly faster CPU.

Just show the kids a see-through MTV window overlaying their instant messaging window. Cool.