Cannot setup the right TV input signal for Vista Media Center (or is it so...)

I recently bought a HP Pavilion m8080cn Media Center PC. As I live in China, it naturally came preloaded with Vista Home Premium in Chinese which makes it very difficult for me to really take advantage of this amazing piece of hardware.

After upgrading the system to Vista ultimate English (the choice of Ultimate vs. Home Premium is by itself worth a long post), I just couldn't get the Media Center to correctly select the input signal for the TV tuner or at least give me a chance to select it manually. It normally should offer me to chose between Antenna, Cable or Satellite, but it kept insisting that it rightfully detected that the Antenna configuration is the right one for me and there is no way I can change it. Several hours later, searching Internet forums and web posts about the subject, still no progress. I was so desperate that I was even ready to do a system recovery of the PC (HP feature) and roll back to the original (working) Chinese Vista Home Premium so that I can figure out on that version why the Media Center was able to offer me the choices I was expecting.

Fortunately enough for me, the recovery procedure refused to work, because when I installed a new version of Vista, it erased the boot sector of the hard drive and made the recovery option from the PC boot screen impossible.

It's kind of disappointing not to find why it was not work by myself, but the situation leaves me no choice but to call the support. There is no way I'm gonna pay Microsoft 60$ to get a live chat with one of their support technicians with no guarantee of result, so I decided to call HP support. The HP support technician tried all the known procedures to correctly setup the Media Center with me with no success. Ready to give up, I asked him before I leave the chat session if he could which TV tuner card is being used in the m8080 and if he could help me get hold of the multimedia keyboard. I wanted at least to get the multimedia keyboard keys to work even if the TV is not working. Out of curiosity I also asked him if he could get the original driver package for the TV tuner card, and he provided me with a download URL from HP a couple of minutes later.

To make sure I did not leave any single unexplored path before I give up, I just went ahead and updated the TV tuner card driver with the package I obtained from the HP support technician, and surprise... The Media Center is now proposing to me all the signal types I was expecting. It worked!

The whole mess was caused by the fact that Vista recognized the TV tuner card by itself during the installation and installed a driver for it that was so bad that it only supports analog antenna signals. That was causing the MC to only propose and automatically select the Antenna input signal for my TV tuner card. Why the hell would Vista do that without any single warning or message that it was selecting a dumb driver for my card?

Anyway, as I have seen many people running into the same problem than me on google with no solution, there is a good probability many of them suffer from the same root cause: the wrong or a limited driver for the tuner card :)