Farhan wrote:
can I transfer/copy installed hotfixes from one pc to another? It is
very painful/long/expensive procedure on dial-up. And also same can
be applied to XP systems.


No. You need to download the hotfix's installer to install to more than one
system. But my personal take on dial-up has for quite a while now been that
it is too expensive these days. Hotfixes and Antivirus definitions are so
large now - on XP and later - and would be on ME if hotfixes were still
being made for it - that you will be almost continually downloading them and
have hardly any bandwidth for anything else - which, of course, defeats the
object of getting the patches and defs in the first place.

Microsoft recently released SP3, which - if you bought XP since then - takes
some of the pain out of doing a new XP installation. For a year or so prior
to SP3 a new XP installation - assuming done with XP SP2! - required
applying between 80 and 100 patches; SP3 integrates those, but already there
are probably another 20 you need to download even if you do have SP3! A year
from now and it could be 40 or 50, and by the time XP support ends it'll
probably be somewhere between 100 and 200 again!

I have almost from day one been saving updates to disk/disc. Now, with XP,
if you'd done that, you didn't really need SP3, because you could install
100 patches by running them from a batch file with switches such as /quick
/norestart. You don't have that option with ME - so you have to double-click
on one patch, restart when it says it needs to, when back to the desktop
double-click the next, then reboot again. It helps to have a copy of the
2003 Security Update cd, though much of those patches have been superceded -
still it contains the important (though small) System Restore patch, and the
rather larger Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Media Player 9. Otherwise it
is much preferable to let Windows Update install them all, because you don't
have to go through the interminable process of doing it manually.

If you are in an area where broadband is still unavailable, that's
unfortunate. The bloat of modern software assumes that everybody has
broadband and everybody has a modern computer with vast disk space and
enough RAM to run Vista, basically. Your solution would be getting someone
who does have broadband to download them all for you and burn them to a cd.

If broadband is available in your area - if you have to re-download
everything, and especially for XP too - you'll likely find that broadband
costs less than dial-up.

Alf