It's been a busy week or so as tar as software updates are concerned. Are you managing to keep up? More to the point, how's your download quota holding up?

Top of the list is the Mac OS X 10.5.4 update, which you should be installing just for the security fixes. If you're still on Tiger, get Security Update 2008-004 and Safari 3.1.2.

Updates may be free, but you can be talking about a lot of data to download. 10.5.4 is anything from around 60M via Software Update to 677M for the combo update for the server version. Tiger users are up for around 130 to 180M for the two updates I mentioned.

Then you can throw in another 4M for the Time Capsule and AirPort Base Station (802.11n) firmware update, 138M for Pro Applications Update 2008-002 (for Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Server and Logic Studio) and 50M for Final Cut Server Update 1.1.

It's not too hard to think of a scenario where you'd need a couple of gigabytes of updaters from Apple just in the last week. If you're responsible for multiple machines or if for some reason you often need to reinstall the OS, you'll almost certainly want the combo updaters so you can go straight from a 10.5 DVD to 10.5.4 with a single update.

Then there's Microsoft.

You've probably recovered from the May arrival of Service Pack 1 for Office 2008 (180M) and/or the 59M 11.5.0 update for Office 2004, but in just over a week Microsoft has pushed out the 45M Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0 (most useful for Office 2004, but you may want to convert Open XML documents for use by other programs), Messenger for Mac 7.0.1 (21M, and probably no big deal unless you use either Mac OS X's VoiceOver feature or European non-English languages), and most recently Remote Desktop Connection for Mac 2 (less than 8M).

RDC has been in beta for almost a year, so those of us who need remote control of Windows XP, Vista or Windows Server from a Mac heaved a sigh of relief when the software finally made it to release.

If you delayed downloading the Office updates, you could be looking at another quarter of a gig on top of Apple's updates.

Now you know why you didn't sign up for that 400M per month Internet plan!

But the size of these updates makes me wonder if we'll see a return to the days of friends and colleagues passing around CDs and other media containing updates, just as we did in the days before 'everyone' had an Internet connection.

At the very least, households and small offices should think in terms of manually downloading updaters so they can easily be applied to multiple Macs, rather than using Software Update on one system at a time.