Originally Posted by Chris

The sky tech who comes to set up your broadband may or may not be a dish installer. I don't know how they divide up the jobs. But if he is, and you bung him a few quid, he may well be prepared to wire up the dish for you.

Once you have a feed from the dish into your living room, you can use an old Sky box to get free channels, provided that box has a current viewing card in it. Sky reissued all it's viewing cards about 2 years ago. If your parents' old box hasn't been used in that time, it may have the wrong card in it. If it has the wrong card, then you won't get the correct regional channels on 101 and 103. You can get a FreesatFromSky viewing card by buying one from Sky.

Alternatively, get a decent Freesat HD box and use that with the dish. We replaced a Sky box running in freesat mode, with a proper branded Freesat box, before Christmas, and it is much better. Sky's freesat service is designed to persuade you to upgrade and it's electronic programme guide is a complete mess because it's full of all Sky's channels which you can't see, but which they want to sell to you. A true branded Freesat box has an 8-day programme guide that contains only the channels you can actually watch.

EDIT

oh, and to answer your earlier question - there is no 'unlikely' about it, a Sky box connected to a Virgin Media cable outlet will most definitely not work. Nothing will work except a box supplied by Virgin Media for which a monthly subscription is being paid.