Big weekly updates using dial up connection

G

Grandad

New member
Hi all,

I have just got a dial up connection as we live in the sticks so no broadband. I have noticed that the weekly updates have been getting very big these days and take me an age to download. Up to one hour and the internet is unusable in effect while downloading the updates. My question is are the weekly updates adding to the definitions on my computer or completely replacing them. Today I am downloading 3.5MB of detections. I wish I had broadband!!!
 
Hi Grandad,

Grandad said:
My question is are the weekly updates adding to the definitions on my computer or completely replacing them
Click to expand...

the weekly updates will be added to your other definition files. The definition files won't be replaced completely, only a part of them.


Best regards,
-Matt-
 
Grandad,
How fast the updates complete will depend on your dial-up connection.
When I was a dial-up user (56kbps/6KB/sec) a whole 1MB took 2 minutes. The 3.5+ update definition for Spybot shouldn't take more than 8-10 minutes.

The standard dial-up plan should be at (56kbps).
 
Thanks for the replies about weekly updates using a dial up connection. We live at the end of a line so only get about 3kb second download speed with a 56kb modem. I exaggerated about it taking an hour to download the weekly update but it takes about 20 minutes. Sorry. I dislike France Telecom.

If the weekly updates are added to the folder on my computer then in a years time the updates will be massive. At the moment my Updates folder is only 11.5MB so it seems to me that the weekly updates mostly replace the files in that folder.

Anyway Spybot Search and Destroy is a great program so I will keep on praying we get broadband here soon.

Thanks all.
 
Hi Grandad,
At the moment my Updates folder is only 11.5MB so it seems to me that the weekly updates mostly replace the files in that folder.
Click to expand...
Yes. ;)

About 2 - 5 of theese files will be updated/replaced every week.
 
Thanks all for explaining how the weekly updates are downloaded. Just one more question which I hope is on topic:

We have 2 computers that use the same version of Spybot Search and Destroy. If I download the weekly updates onto my computer can I copy across to my wifes computer the updated files offline? If so which files/folders do I copy across?

Thanks again.
 
drragostea said:
Grandad, you can find the latest updates here. No need to "transfer/move" files since that is complicated and confusing.
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html]
Click to expand...

-
Thanks for the information drragostea. Because we have a dial up connection and the weekly update takes a long time which eats into our limited connection time I thought it would be useful to be able to:

Download the weekly update on my computer and then be able to update any other computer that uses Spybot Search and Destroy offline.

I know it is not as easy as just doing the update but would like to know if it is possible and how to do it. If you don't want to publish how to do it on the forum a PM of how to do it would be appreciated.

Thanks again.
 
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Well, what I can tell you, honestly, is that it will be very confusing because you may not know what is updated and what is not. An alternative would be downloading the updates on another computer with a faster connection and transfer the definition updates (spybotsd_updates.exe) to your own computer. Executing the update file will update your Spybot.
Either that or you'll have to make the best of it of what you currently have, sorry. If there is another way I would love to post it but right now there is not.

Grandad said:
If I download the weekly updates onto my computer can I copy across to my wifes computer the updated files offline? If so which files/folders do I copy across?
Click to expand...
Problem is it is just too confusing. Even if there was a way it would be really difficult to put it into words. You might risk messing things up by copying and replacing folders.
 
Thanks drragostea. Now I understand. Takes a while sometimes but I got there in the end.

The weekly updates can be downloaded as an exe file direct from the Safer Networking website without using the integrated updater program. Once downloaded I can use it to update our computers offline. I will give it a go and see what happens.

Thanks for all your help everyone, you do a great job.
 
you can use the "includes" file

instead of using the auto update or search for updates etc.
you can download the includes file and apply it to both machines with one download instead of waiting for both to download & update.

cheers

Edit:
I see that using the "includes" file has already been mentioned but when I was in the thread all the replies weren't showing
and there's no delete post that I can find
 
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Incremental updates

I too am on dialup and have multiple computers. The problem isn't that I don't have the time to just let my computer sit here downloading the weekly updates, the thing is that it takes 16 minutes on average to do it on dialup (yes, I just timed it.)

After getting the update (3/25/09) I looked inside the includes.zip that I just downloaded and it has files in it that haven't been updated in months. Those files are completely wasting bandwidth for both of us. Not to mention that the files that have been updated have been increased in size by a relatively small amount. The supplemental.zip file has 14 files in it, 3 of them are less than a month old. I don't need to download those older parts, I got them when they were new. That file wastes 116kb or 29 seconds on dialup.

A more cost effective and efficient solution would be what most updaters do, incremental updates. Where you only get the parts of the files that have been changed or at the very least the whole file that changed.
Out of the 16 files in the updated includes.zip file only 6 of them are worth updating cause the rest weren't new. It's only a savings of 86kb but over the millions of people that use this product it adds up quickly. And on our dialup it's a savings of 21 seconds just for that single file. But it could be significantly smaller by only including the NEW parts of those individual files in the compressed zip files the updater gets. I hope that incremental updates will make it into a new version of spybot someday soon.

For you broadband users, none of this matters in the slightest, but unfortunately for those of us who don't live in or very near a city ISP's just don't care about us and so we have to pick and choose how long we're going to wait just to see a website or if we really have the time to download something while we can't do anything else until it's finished.

Please consider pushing ONLY the changes and not the fluff in the updates, thanks. And sorry for necromancing this thread :rolleyes:

 
How fast is dial-up connection? 56kbps dial-up connections should be the model/standard for a dial-up plan nowadays. So a 1MB file download would usually take 2 minutes on that speed (6KB/Second).

I don't remember so clearly about some of the files not being updated but md usa spybot fan explained it in one post (lost the link). I'll try to piece it up together but basically just because the update file has not been 'updated' for sometime does not make it useless.

Some updates, you just need to download only once and your done.
 
Yes, I'm fully aware how the program works and how the updater works. And for a fresh install I would need some of those files that are over a year old, but if it's just a simple update why would I ever need to download a file that hasn't been updated in that amount of time, it would already be on my computer in the appropriate directory.

And because of the distance the maximum connection speed I can get is 45.2kb/s (45200/8=5.62KB/s) with an average of 4.4KB/s... My average connection is 44kb/s.


I'm simply asking for incremental updates instead of total updates. It's something that saves the company money, and saves your customers time. Some people have to pay for their time online with dialup in addition to their monthly costs. I would think this would be a prudent update to make considering that most other applications do it that way especially since this program is provided for free. But anyway, just an idea. I just hate downloading the same thing every single week when it's been on my hard drive for months already.
 
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