I would certainly be looking at a new ISP if you can’t stay on line for more than a few minutes.
What type of connection do you have dial-up or broadband ?
You could ask a friend to download a full VPS Update for you. avast! VPS Update - Manual Download - For off-line systems you can, save the file to a CD or USB drive and transfer it to the off-line system and run it to update the VPS signatures file.
Though that doesn’t resolve your problem, what update is it that you are trying to do as the virus signatures are incremental and should take a few seconds, so I don’t know what is going on in your system.
My concern is why you can’t just do the auto or manual update for the VPS signatures as they shouldn’t take minutes, even on dial-up, but seconds to update. You didn’t answer what connection method you have.
Once you have the complete VPS file, installed then any future updates should be incremental only downloading the latest signatures that have been added. Typically this is a download of around 25-50KB often less today’s update was I think 15KB.
Yes. It will update your virus database to the latest one every time (no problem if you ‘miss’ an update, it will correct everything).
Programs updates will require that you download the entire setup file.
Of course, David’s questions remain… you’re choosing not the best method to update, for sure.
Are you in the USA? If so, update downloads should take less than one minutes even on dial-up. I know because I am in the USA, on dial-up, and my updates rarely take a whole minute to download. Who is your ISP?