It often stalls, or is just plane slow. One minute its fine, the next it dies for 20 minutes after downloading some updates. Then I have to restart. And to think, this company wants us to tie our PC's to them like terminals over the Internet.

 

yeah I couldnt download a bunch of updates a few days ago...very frustrating

 

These days the internet is just brutal without broadband.
I dislike crap like 'windows update' because if I have to resinstall windows, you have to re-download everything again!
Screw that!!!

 

Yeah,

It just took me 5-6 minutes to download and install 1 XP update and 1 Driver update (1.1 MB). I have a cable modem!

 

I have Road Runner. Windows Update used to run really fast. Like just a couple minutes to get everything. But lately its slow and dies. But I agree, out in the field, it sucks when a customer doesn't have broadband. I carry IE on a CD. Then I just get the critical updates. Not worth the wait to get anything else.

 

It seems like that's the latest trend. On NT/2000 machines, you can't download the whole IE without using some arcane command. But on Win9x machine, you just choose "download only" and check all the boxes when you run the installer. :rolleyes" Now AOL is doing it. I hate AOL too, but I have to carry it so I can reinstall customer's systems. It used to be that you just went to their site, or better yet the FTP server, and downloaded a big executable. Now you download a small installer which gets the executable. But it leaves the big executable in your temp folder. So I just burned that sucker into a CD. The whole software industry is making it harder and harder to distribute their product without a broadband connection. What's the problem? The software is free in these cases. Why make someone spend 12 hours trying to get it through a modem on each and every computer?

 

Oh hell yes I am with you guys on this! I haven't been able to update my systems for a while now because their update feature sucks. I think sometimes technology needs to stop advancing in certain areas. The ftp updates were great and easy! They don't even offer that anymore do they?