Time once again to check in on the most popular, and the trend away from cell phone domination continues this month! Hooray for Netbooks and TVs! Maybe it's the fall shopping season finally starting to turn people's minds away from phones. It's so much nicer to buy a gift that doesn't come with a two-year contract.

And of course there's a prize in this Top 5. So watch it, and answer the question in the comments below. One of the first 10 people to answer correctly wins the racing shirt. Properly laundered, I promise.

Picking the right TV is important. Right behind your health, and your family, and world politics. But face it, it's up there. It beat world peace once in a survey--seriously.

Anyway, this week the Top 5 tells you the best TVs you can get. And you have a chance to win a Star Wars space shooter. Watch the show, answer the question in the comments below, and you could get a free thing. And that's important too.

Earlier this year, we counted down the best movie robots ever and you seemed to quite enjoy that. So, we went back to the drawing board to decide on the best TV robots ever, and again we're including androids. It's quite a different crew from the movie scene. Friendlier--some might say, smarter--robots dominate this list. But then when is a robot not smart?

You also get a chance to win this time. Not one, not two, but three prizes. Watch our video to get the question, then post your answer below. Be one of the first 10 people to answer correctly and you could win!

Update Congrats to PacGamer who was one of many many people to correctly identify Robot as Model B-9, Class M-3, General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot. PacGamer came up lucky in the random drawing and gets the Bag, Game and shiny penny.

Here are the list of nominees from Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribers at DBSTalk.com, and I experienced a blank program guide with a date of 7/14 and all shows noted as "To Be Announced." While channels continued to receive programming, any recordings were disrupted.

Callers to DirecTV report they were told the problem was fixed or being fixed and they would not lose any programming. A hard reset (or reboot) seemed to fix the problem temporarily, but eventually the guide data would disappear again. However many ToDo lists were gone. One viewer reported he had paused a basketball game while putting his kids to bed and when he came back, the prompt for deleting an episode was on the screen and the end of the game was lost.

One enterprising user identified as dragonbait on DBSTalk.com seemed to have tracked down the problem to faulty guide data coming from one satellite.

"I just forced one of my HR20s to look at channels from 103 sat by recording 2 Starz channels; therefore, it should be getting guide and potentially date/time info from 119 sat. This box's date changed to 7/14 around 11:10.

Similarly, I forced my other HR20 to get its guide data from the 101 sat by tuning it to XM channels. Its date did not change.

Therefore, it would seem that my suspicion that the 119 sat is sending the wrong date might be true. Further tests are needed to confirm."

No official posts from DirecTV had been made in the troubleshooting area of the DirecTV forums as of this posting.

Brian Cooley and I lose our jobs, but before we do, we answer questions on wireless TV streaming, VirtualBox, and more.

Watch the show on CNET TV.

Things we crave:

Watchmen iPhone app

Suction cups mount your camera to your car hood

Download of the week

Afloat 2.1.1

First Look

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1

Quick Tip Send and receive text messages in Gmail

CNET Store

Take a look at shop.cnet.com where you can order CNET T-shirts, mugs, and more.

Your video calls:

Alexander in Brazil wanted to know about PC gaming in Boot Camp on a Mac, and how to change the middle-click button option so it doesn't bring up the Dashboard in OS X. Windows games play pretty well, but you have to take in account the Mac hardware. It's not up to what a good PC gaming rig would be. As for the middle-click, go to System Prefs pane choose expose and spaces and look for Dashboard. There's a setting there for turning of the middle-click to bring up Dashboard.

Your calls:

What's the best free antivirus? Download.com has a great page of editors' picks for security software you should look at. Our top free antivirus pick at CNET is AVG Free Edition.

Need some good free Mac software? Take a look at OpenSourceMac.org

I didn't have an answer for our caller from Mumbai about port forwarding in VirtualBoxc, but Tales in the #cnetfans chat room suggested looking at this posting.

If you want some info on TV tuner cards with closed captioning, look over at the Hauppage site for their WinTV2000 Application FAQ.

Some of the best gear Brian Cooley has found for wirelessly streaming TV is from Netgear. Here's its product pages.

E-mail us!
Whether it's a regular text note, or a recorded video question, you can send it to cnetlive@cnet.com. Keep your videos to 15 seconds or less, post them to a Web site like YouTube, and then e-mail us the link.

Brian Cooley gives us the scoop on the LA Auto Show, we help you recover songs from a crashed iPod, and Bonnie Cha reviews the BlackBerry Storm.

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Things We Crave

Hands on with the new Xbox 360 dashboard

2010 Lexus RX gets update, new Remote Touch controller

First Look

RIM BlackBerry Storm

Best of the Web

SearchMe and Google Voice Search.

Quick Tip

Stop MSN or Windows Live Messenger spam

Your video calls

Iyaz sent a video about stuttering problems in OS X Leopard. Brian Tong noted that many other users reported this problem on Apple's message boards. Some say they fixed it by downgrading from OS X 10.5.5 to plain old 10.5. Some even resorted by downgrading to 10.4. BT noted that some folks have found that switching from the audio jack to digital and back temporarily solves the problem.

Your calls

Our caller had some 40,000 slides to scan in. Using ScanCafe for example, that would cost over $9,000 if you send it to a service. WikiHow has a tutorial with eight different ways to attack this problem, including using a video camera. You could also adapt a flatbed scanner to scan slides, or a buy a scanner just for slides.

OS X can read files on NTFS hard drives but it can't write to them. Use Macfuse to make OS X capable of writing to NTFS hard drives.

To recover files off a dead iPod, you can try some revival methods. If those don't work, take the hard drive out of the iPod and put it in an enclosure. You'll need an enclosure for 1.8-inch Toshiba Drives, like this one. You could also buy an old iPod off eBay that has a good battery but a bad hard drive, and then transplant the good hard drive into it. Then if the drive is damaged, use some free software to recover the files. My favorites are photorec or PC Inspector.

Looking for a PC alternative to buying a MacBook? Take a look at our 5 Best laptops.

Our caller with the dead Audiovox LCD TV screen probably needs a new TV, but if he's willing to try to fix it himself, here's some guidance on fuse problems that could be helpful.

Holiday Help Desk! Don't forget to watch the Holiday Help Desk, Friday, November 28 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT, at CNET TV. You could win an iPod Touch. E-mail us!
Whether it's a regular text note, or a recorded video question, you can send it to cnetlive@cnet.com. Keep your videos to 15 seconds or less, post them to a Web site like Youtube, and then e-mail us the link.

We had problems. You kinda just need to watch. But we answered a lot of questions!

Watch the show on CNET TV.

Things We Crave

2Wire MediaPoint set-top box

BlackBerry Storm gets official pricing and release date

Best of the Web

BrowserSPY

Your calls
Here's how to use GParted to resize your Windows Vista partition. Here's one of the reasons why resizing Vista partitions is an issue. And if the Vista repair above doesn't work, here's an Ubuntu forum thread on a workaround using a Windows XP disk.

Having problems with the T-Mobile G1's data access? It could be a coverage issue. Here's their coverage map.

Our take on the best MP3 players with Bluetooth.

Need to buy a digital TV converter box? Here's which ones to buy.

Need a bigger TiVo hard drive? Here's how to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it.

E-mail us!
Whether it's a regular text note, or a recorded video question, you can send it to cnetlive@cnet.com. Keep your videos to 15 seconds or less, post them to a Web site like Youtube, and then e-mail us the link.

The Apple TV is an excellent little device, if you limit yourself to the Apple universe of music, video, and podcasts. Who wants to be limited? Watch our video on how to add DivX, AVI, and more to your Apple TV. Then return here for the written steps.

XBMC is free and open-source software for Windows, Linux, and OS X that many consider the best media-center software out there. It grew out of the mod chips used on the original Xbox. Because it can run on OS X, that means it'll run on the Apple TV, which runs OS X.

Boxee, is a service based on XBMC that is currently in private alpha. You can get some free invites at www.boxee.tv/cnet. You'll have to download and set that service up separately.

Let's get started. Make sure you have your Apple TV turned off. Then make sure you have a USB stick with at least 1GB of space.

1. Download the ATVUSB-Creator from Google Code.
2. Insert a "bootable" USB drive into your Mac. Most USB drives are bootable. Watch out for drives that have the U3 software pre-installed on them; they're the ones that give the most trouble.
3. Run the ATVUSB-Creator.
4. Select "ATV patchstick."
5. Make sure the XBMC and Boxee plug-ins are selected.
6. Make sure your USB drive is selected.
7. And press "Create Using."
8. Again, make sure you Apple TV is off...remove the USB drive and plug it into your Apple TV.
9. Power on your Apple TV, and the patchstick will run the ATV bootloader.
10. After the bootloader finishes, remove it and restart your Apple TV. It now has options for Boxee/XBMC on the main menu.
11. Click on Boxee, then select Update Boot Launcher--this helps prevent problems with the remote.
12. Then select XMC/Boxee, then Update, and then Boxee. This will download Boxee from the Net.
13. Once it's done installing, restart your Apple TV. Then do the same for XBMC.
You'll probably want to explore the FAQs at XBMC and the blog at Boxee to make the most of your new capabilities.

Sometimes you don't find out about a good TV show until partway through its run, or maybe you don't get a certain channel, or even worse, for whatever reason, your DVR fails to record your favorite show. Thanks to the Internet, there are many ways to catch up, and maybe even ditch cable. Watch our Insider Secret video to see some of our favorite ways to get TV shows online, and then come back here for the links.

There are still many popular shows that don't put their content online. At least not legally. And this ain't about piracy, so put The Pirate Bay down for a moment. Still, a large number of shows are available legally online. Here are some of my favorite resources to find them.

Step one, go to the network's Web site. More and more channels put full episodes on their site. Look in the video tabs and find a link, usually called "full episodes." That may be the best way right there. All the networks stream their shows with commercial interruptions.

Another resource is a video aggregator site like Hulu.com. Hulu was launched as a cooperative venture of TV networks to provide easy access to movies and TV shows. Although anything you find there is likely to also be at the networks Web site, it's convenient if you want to watch shows from multiple networks at one site. The shows here also have commercials, and for some unfathomable reason they don't keep all the back episodes around. It's also U.S. only.

One of my favorite portals to check for TV shows is AOL video. Yep good old AOL. They have partnerships with several video suppliers, like Hulu for instance. You can find a wealth of back episodes from major shows there.

Another good portal is Fancast. The service is operated by Comcast and is meant to tell you all the places you can watch any show. When you search for a show, they give you any streaming versions they have access to, plus a schedule of airings on TV and any DVD versions available.

If you're a Netflix subscriber, another place to find old TV show episodes is through the Netflix streaming service. Your account allows you to stream many TV shows that are out on DVD. You'll have to have Internet Explorer or a dedicated device like the Roku Netflix box to use the service.

Another good free streaming provider is Joost. You can download the application from Joost.com, though they soon plan to make it a plug-in that works in your Web browser. It gives you free access to clips and full shows from several different channels.

When you have to break down and pay

If the show you want isn't streaming anywhere, you may have to buy the show. The bad news is that costs money. The good news is you don't have to watch commercials.

Apple's iTunes lets you download many TV shows for $1.99 an episode or a whole season sometimes at a slight discount. The shows will play on your computer or on Apple mobile devices like the iPhone or on Apple's Apple TV. They won't play on non-Apple mobile devices though.

Amazon's Video on Demand lets you buy shows, too. Once you buy a show, you can stream them in your Web browser on Mac or Windows any time you want. You can also download your shows to a Windows machine and move them to several portable devices. You can also have the shows sent to your TiVo, which is pretty cool.

And there's also BitTorrent. Yeah I know, we said no piracy. But BitTorrent.com, the official makers of BitTorrent, provides TV shows through their Torrent Entertainment network that are completely legal.

You also can get TV shows from your game console. The Xbox 360 sells TV shows in its Marketplace, some in high-definition. And Sony is touting Movies and TV shows at the push of a button for the PS3 and PSP.

That covers the major options out there, but there are still others. To sum up, you have approximately three options when attempting to catch up on a TV show.

1. Stream for free, but watch commercials.
2. Download for pay but have no commercials.
3. Or break the law and pirate it and risk going to court.