You've already got a fairly good idea for the major updates, though they can be a bit larger in some cases. The daily updates are 2 or 3 MB I believe and there are occasional updates every few weeks that are a few MB.
The reason that no one can tell you the exact size is that it 'depends'. It depends whether you already have the most recent previous version installed. It depends if one or more of the several files in a major release have already been downloaded and even a part of one or more of these files, since BITS keeps track of the partial downloads and starts up again where it left off. It even depends if the most recent Windows Updates have already been installed, sicne Automatic Updates uses the same background services, so these will delay the delivery of the OneCare update until they are completed.
The other problem is that there isn't anywhere you can really check the exact size that has already been downloaded, so it wouldn't matter if you knew the exact starting size anyway.
The reality is that Dial-up is annoying for any download, but it's more so if you want to know and can't find out. That's why I simply logon the Dial-up PC I support to the ISP for several hours each time I'm there and go do something else, checking it every couple hours for sgnificant network activity in the Network tab of Task Manager. Once it stops significant downloads, it's done, simple as that. As long as you don't pay for time spent online, leaving the PC online overnight when the Onecare icon turns red should allow it to catch up.
One important thing, the absolute minimum recommended network speed for OneCare is a 56kb/s modem, which is really typically about 50kb/s download best case. Mine operates at about 46kb/s or better, but anything below that is almost useless. Even if you attech at that speed, if your ISP isn't well peered and much of Europe is infamous for that, your actual download rate may not really be the same as the connection speed. This is harder to judge since speed tests are generally only done to one or two known sites, not the actual sites you perform downloads from.
You already know the problem here, but without a higher speed connection, it's really becoming nearly impossible to keep a PC current with all the basic OS and application updates it needs, let alone OneCare or any other dynamically updated protection program.
OneCareBear
