Upgrading from Skybox F5

Evening all, I've just got into the old sat setup in the past few weeks having been on cable for 15 years lol.

ANYWAY whilst the F5 was cheap and cheerful I wasn't impressed with the EPG and menus so I decided to plump for the Technomate 800HD.

I bought one which already had an image on it but tried the various guides on here.

At present I'm running the TM800_update-Dd-tmsw-20121021.rar image but I'm struggling with the following;

The picture quality of the FTA channels is piss poor compared with the F5.
What's the best FTP program to connect (I'm using a mac by the way).
Is this the only way to update the cline ?

Cheers
Craig