Must I school you again? http://howto.homelinux.net/swf/yum.html The only difference in this flash between updating and installing is I would click the update tab and the hit an update button...
I saw a Red Hat system - supposedly the best - take six hours to complete up2date.
Funny I freshly installed an XP Pro system the other day and it took about as long.. You're leaving out little factors like (what release was it?, what was the network speed?, what was the disk configuration?) these and any number of other things can make *ANY* system take a long time to update.
HAHAHAHAHAAAA! You want me to go to some hacker website for my security updates? LMAO, what kind of an idiot would do that? And you wanting users to do something exactly that stupid shows how little you really understand about how to properly secure a system.
Apples and Oranges, this Linux system already had everything loaded on it, and was only behind a couple of months on patches, and it still took 6 hours to get everything. P4 2.6 GHz system with a 1.5 Mhz download capacity, but up2date wallowed along at 45k the whole time.