I'm still living in a 56k world at home. However here in my office, I've got a screaming fast internet connection and a machine with a CD burner. Seems like a relatively painless way to upgrade to newer versions of bloatware such as Internet Explorer. Naturally, Microsoft has found a way to make the easy difficult.

When you download IE, you get just a small executable which relies on an internet connection to pull down the rest of the package. If I weren't using Microsoft's flagship OS, Windows 2000, the installer would give me an option to download only. But, the readme file advises users of Win2k to read this article so that you can run the installer with extra args like this:

"C:\Windows Update Setup Files\ie5setup.exe" /c:"ie5wzd.exe /d /s:""#E"