visit PH Anderson's web page.
This link in particular has the product I'm thinking of, and he says he has a complete assembled kit on a Breadboard for $50 - which is half of another product quoted on this BBS.


He offers kits of various products including Dallas 1-wire temperature sensors that can report to a serial port the readings.

I think you'd find something there you could use, admittedly its not all a nice little box you buy, a few people here could build one for you for a few dollars if you ask them nicely and use these kits.

The site has detailed info on what the data looks like so you can knock up your VB program.

Some of the kits allow you to have to have multiple sensors and you could even keep the temeperature sensors in the garage but have the electronics in your house somewhere near your PC thats gathering the data. [Thats the beauty of the Dallas 1-wire stuff - it does the conversion of temperature on-board and can send the temperature reading data down a single pair wire to the PC some distance away.]