I live in a small country with very limited and expensive internet. Think US$100 for 30 hours of dial-up (no unlimited option) per month and US$900 per month for a 128k permanent connection. One result of this is a very low % of PCs internet connected and very poor management of anti-virus software. I have been asked by a hospital who only have dial-up to help them put things right after a virus outbreak which caused significant data loss. They were keen to do it right so I recommended NIS 2009. They had a couple of NIS 2007 installs & there hadn't been a problem with these. However, one PC with an old version of Symantec anti-virus and 6 month old signatures got hit.
Most PCs are not even networked so USB sticks are the main accessory for everyone and many sticks are full of viruses and spyware.
They purchased a multi-seat licenced version and I downloaded the latest update .exe file to get around the initial update process. This worked fine until 24 hours later, all 5 PCs tried to download 37 Mb of program updates each - all via a network with one PC acting as an Internection Connection Server via a slow modem connection, usually connected around 2 hours per day to keep costs down.
Many PCs here use free AV products where they can and these seem to do fine updating over a modem without undue annoyance. I was not expecting this sort of updating with NIS.
You may laugh but this is not abnormal here. Most PCs are never able to obtain the normal monthly Microsoft updates due to bandwidth limitations.
Thinking I had done the right thing, I now find myself scrambling for a solution. (The hospital has no IT staff at all.) Is there a way to limit LiveUpdate to virus/spyware signature updates only ? Or is there a way I can download a .exe file ONCE (from another location with 256k connection) which I can apply to the 5 PCs. It looks like there are significant program updates once a week on top of the usual virus/spyware signature updates.
Is there a way to manage the inevitable attempt by all PCs to perform updates as soon as an internet connection is made ? As the PCs are hot-seats (shared by multiple users) manual updating is probably not going to happen well.
Any advice appreciated. I am more than comfortable hacking registry entries if it comes to this.
PS You may understand why I might say "what is Youtube ?"