The Elvidge Family

I love MediaMonkey for organising MP3s and syncing my iPod....but I keep having to use iTunes for this and that. I found this way of transferring my ratings to iTunes......very simple. This will work for WMP, Winamp, Realplayer too)
1) Clear now playing list.
2) Get all your 5 star rated songs onto the ‘now playing list’ (right-click option).
3) File menu option to save the now playing list - as an m3u file.
4) import play list into itunes.
5) mark every song in the playlist as 5 star
6) repeat for each rating from 1 to 4
I just did this for ratings 3 to5
P.S. iTunes can still be tricky when importing playlists and can produce duplicates

The box kept freezing when I entered the planner or gave an error message.  Here's how I fixed it.

WARNING - following this advice is totally at your discretion and anything which happens to your digibox as a result is your responsibility, not mine. You will lose all recorded programmes from your Sky+ Planner.

STEP 1 - Soft Reset: Press 'services' on your Sky plus remote, then select option 4. Next press 0, 1, select - you should now see the engineer's menu. Choose option 8, 'Full System Reset'. The box will now take a few minutes to reset itself.
Now try pausing or recording again, and if the problem persists....go to next step.

STEP 2 - Hard Reset: Disconnect the digibox from the mains power. Press and hold the 'left' and 'right' navigation buttons on the front of the digibox whilst you reconnect the mains power. Continue holding the buttons in for about 20 seconds, and when the ring of light on the front comes on, press the 'select' button on the front of the digibox (between the left and right buttons you were holding). The Sky+ recording logo lights will spin backwards and, according to the Sky engineer, this will "clear the hard drive".
Once this is done, disconnect the digibox from the mains power again and this time press and hold the 'back up' button whilst you reconnect the mains power. Continue holding it for about 15 seconds until 3 lights on the front of the box come on and you get a full-screen message saying "Updating system software. Do not disconnect mains supply or satellite dish."
Leave the digibox doing its thing for about 10 minutes and it should be fixed! Try pausing and recording things again.

This second step is what worked for me.
Update1: But this kept reoccurring until I changed my Hard Drive Here is everything you need to know about upgrading the HDD. I replaced my already upgraded 160gb disk with a 250gb 7200 spin speed (as that was all they sell now) and so far so good.
Update2: I found out my problem was not a hard drive issue but SKY software updates which made larger HDD incompatible. See Here
I was able to get around this by disabling automatic sleep mode so my box was always on.

This is a very quick summary of what I did to set up my latest dual boot Win XP Pro System and Ubuntu (on HP Mininote)
1. Install Win XP - using the disk partitioning tool at start-up. I set aside 30GB for the XP System & Programs, 2GB for the PageFile, 15GB for the Ubuntu partition (Left unformatted) and then the remaining space for a documents partition.
2. Once I had installed Win XP and made all the changes I wanted there, I made a copy of the windows partition and boot sector incase this was corrupted.
3. I used the Ubunto boot installation CD to install Linux. This only worked in the Graphics Safe Mode option . I followed the instructions provided here for the Ubuntu manual partitioning bit (slightly different in newer Ubuntu versions)
4. I used the instructions here to modify the boot menu in Ubuntu so that XP was the default operating system by default.

Windows Updates fail to install (especially after new install & update to Service Pack 3).  I have had to do this on a number of machine re-installs after SP3 updates.

Microsoft resolution found here (typed bellow)

1. Stop the Automatic Updates service. To do this, follow these steps:
a. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
b. At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
net stop wuauserv
2. Register the Wups2.dll file. To do this, follow these steps:
a. At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll
(Note For a computer that is running Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, type the following command, and then press ENTER: regsvr32 %windir%\syswow64\wups2.dll)
b. Click OK on each verification message that you receive.
3. Start the Automatic Updates service. To do this, type the following command at the command prompt, and then press ENTER:
net start wuauserv
4. Exit the command prompt. To do this type exit, and then press ENTER.

Note: This worked on one machine - first time / the second time I tried this it did not work and I needed to download the latest Windows Updater and install that - then it all started working again.