Choosing a tv/capture card

[FranticFred]

Hi,
Im kinda new to this so i wondered if someone could give me some advice. I am looking to buy a tv/capture card soon to record from tv,video sources and was wondering

1.Is there any difference between a tv card and a capture card other than name?

From what I was able to gather from the guides and other bits on this site i want to record to an uncompressed(avi) or lossless format first of all

2.Can you only use the software provided to make initial capture fom the card or is there 3rd party software where you can point it at a particular input on the card?

Lastly Im pretty clueless as what kind of card to get Im sure I want to record to full resolution pal avi for best quality, any reccomendations??

Quality is of the utmost id rather go through a longer process to get the best quality(i.e capture to avi then convert to mpeg2)then have worse quality captures

[FranticFred]

Here is my comp spec

athlon 1.7
xp os
512 ddr ram
200gb hdd for capture files