On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Sean Donelan wrote:

"It occurred to me that one way to make things easier for dial-up users, and even broadband users in many cases, would be to issue periodic update CDs. Imagine a disc with all of the updates on it and a program, it could even be written in Windows Script Host, to check a system for which updates need to be installed, apply them in the correct order and even reboot in between. Such a program would not be hard to write."

[...]

"I recently put this suggestion to Microsoft and their response basically avoided the whole issue. Why wouldn't the company want to offer such a CD, assuming that's the motivation behind their stonewalling?"

From this month's issue of /PC Pro/ magazine (UK, Issue 109) :

"please accept our apologies for the lack of Microsoft patches or DirectX on our cover discs. Microsoft US has banned the inclusion of any of its code on magazine discs. Presumably, the company assumes we all have broadband to download up to 166MB for DirectX 9b or 134MB for Windows XP Service Pack 1a." And that's without mentioning the mean-time-till-infection of an unpatched system, of course... Regards, Jonathan