We have many Windows XP computers sharing one connection to the internet. These machines are set to download all available automatic updates and then prompt the user to install them.

Whenever Patch Tuesday rolls around, our internet usage pegs out, and remains that way for most of the day, and sometimes into the following Wednesday. This hurts!

I still want the machines to start to download the updates as soon as they are available, but if it takes until Thursday or Friday before the last updates are downloaded, that's still better than the latency and dropped connections we are seeing now as a result of the internet connection bottleneck.

What can I do to throttle back how rapidly each machine downloads the updates, while still having them all start the download process as soon as the updates are available? I have no desire to run a WSUS server. Also, the internet connection is more than enough, whenever there are no updates to download.