Internet has come a long way since the end of the 20^th century. Large percentage of developed world countries’ population has broadband and the Web site content producers seem to count on that.

Here’s an example: while on a short vacation in Serbia this February I was forced to connect to the Internet through a 56Kb dial-up connection. As I browsed the Internet, I ran into many interesting things that were too much for the dial-up to handle like software downloads, videos and whatnot. So I just locked the tabs in Firefox and left them for later.

One day I had to restart the browser for some reason. At the time, I had about 30 tabs open, “saved” for later. When I re-opened the browser, I had to wait 30 minutes(!) until all the pages loaded – it was about 11–14MB of content. An average page, text and graphics (no videos) was about 300KB. Not dial-up friendly!

Still, this was a bit extreme, opening 30 tabs all at once. But think about Windows updates for a moment. Between now and Windows XP Service Pack 2 (which is what most of the new machines had installed up to recently) Microsoft has issued over 60 updates. Updating the machine over the Internet is a major PITA in this case. It would be nice if someone with a fast connection could download all the updates, burn them to a CD/DVD and give to a poor soul still on a dial-up.

Microsoft does issue ISO images of the security patches, but on a monthly basis and for several OSes at once (Windows 2000, 2003 Server, XP) and for many languages. If you just want an ISO image of all the patches and an easy way to install them, I recommend Offline-Update. The link is to English version of an article describing the utility (hosted in Germany, done by a guy from the University of Kiel), the download is on the page 4.

Before you start downloading, it would be good to check if the target machine needs the updates in the first place. At least this is easy and supported by Microsoft – all you need is Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. The picture to the left shows the scan results of my system. I’m on broadband, so naturally I’m always up-to-date, but if I weren’t, the missing patches would show up at the top of the result list.