Limited connection in a third world country

Gnimble

Distinguished
Jun 29, 2010
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Hello everyone,

A brother of mine will be working in a third world country (Papua New Guinea) so will have limited network connections. He pays $1 per megabyte of data downloaded when he is a major city. Unfortunately, when he connects to the Internet via a USB modem to read emails, the system also download updates (from the many software) and also uploads as well; this greatly increase the cost for him to use the Internet.

Is there a way to disable all updates? And is there a way to set up email so that it won't load pictures or download attachments?

He has both a Mac and a Netbook so would like to set both to just download just the content of messages, but no pictures or attachments.

Thank you very much,
Gnimble
 
Solution


Yes, you...

buzznut

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Sep 26, 2007
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Yes, you can disable automatic windows updates. This is fairly easy to do in any windows system, in WIN7 I usually go to computer/system properties and choose automatic updates from the lower left corner of the properties page. In XP this can be found under the windows security settings. You'll get all kinds of warnings, but it is relatively safe to turn off auto updates until you are ready to do so manually. I do recommend that he continue to receive updates for any antivirus program however as turning that off is actually quite risky.

As for other software, most vendors willl have a way of disabling auto updates but typically you can just tell it not to update as it attempts to do so, things like adobe, itunes, quicktime, flash, etc will ask if you want to update now. Just say no.

As far as email goes, it depends on the client (t-bird, etc). To avoid this however, I recommend using internet mail such as yahoo. My ISP has online email that does not display pictures and you can view the email w/o downloading the attachments, unless you want to.

If this is not available through his ISP, then I would get a hotmail account or whatever.
 
Solution


Macs don't update their software anywhere near as much as Windows because there aren't the security holes in the software that need to be patched. Your brother might want to avoid Firefox and Opera though - they frequently update with no apparent positive result afterwards. Regardless of cost, he needs his AV to update though and also ought to have the monthly second Tuesday M$ security update. [/#000ff]