Local Mirror For Microsoft Update?

Prompted by my Dad getting a new PC for work, and me telling to him to get all the latest windows updates, I decided that I should actually do the same thing for my laptop. But there are a lot of them, and it's reeeaaallly slow, even just the bit where it checks to see what updates you need. And of course with the lack of reasonable broadband in SA, most people are on dial-up ... so suddenly I had a great idea: maybe the local microsoft site has a local mirror! Couldn't see anything on their site, so I e-mailed them, and after going through various departments they came back to me saying that I could download updates from http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/athome/security/update/default.mspx, or for R20 I could pick up a CD containing the latest updates from their office (on the other side of the country from me), or for R60 they could courier me the CD. Which isn't bad, I guess, but won't solve the problem for future updates. And just how up to date would their CD be, anyway? (a question to which they have not yet replied).

So I went to the link they sent, despite the fact that it's still at microsoft.com and presumably hosted in the US, and surprise! the windows and office update links just link straight back to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ and http://office.microsoft.com/officeupdate respectively. Which is pretty useless.

So either I'm stuck spending hours and hours downloading from the US, or I have to struggle to find a microsoft employee who actually knows what they're talking about, which may be even more difficult. It would just make so much sense for microsoft to have local mirrors in countries where they have a web/physical presence. But this is that whole USA-centric, broadband-centric approach that I was complaining about before.

And on that note, an update to the problems I was having with MicrosoftELearning, transferring offline player content from one pc to another: it turns out that if you download even just a single section of content on the second PC, it then sees all the content that you have transferred as well. I assume that if you download new content (for the same or new courses) on the first PC again and transfer it again, that it will then see that too without having to any further downloading on the second PC, but I haven't tried it out yet. Really, they could have just told me that in the first place!

Update: Microsoft SA have admitted that there is no local mirror. Which I think is downright pathetic. We don't all have broadband. I wonder if they realise that this is probably a major contributor to the number of unpatched windows PCs?