Software Update - Huge installation!

Question

I recently bought an iMac and an Apple Support representative brought it to my attention that I am running System 10.5.4 and the latest System is 10.5.6. I went into Software Update and it showed me 7 updates that total 966.1 Megs. I believe one of the updates is over 600 Megs by itself! Would it be safer to just check off a few of the updates at a time to download and install, or leave all the updates checked, click install, and hope for the best? Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Best regards,
Ken
P.S. I ask this question because of a bad experience with Windows. I left all the updates checked and ultimately it crashed my computer. I had to reinstall Windows.

Answer 1

Don't do them all at once:
Updating
There's been recent discussions as to what steps are truly necessary in doing a minimal problem update.
I think #1 to which all agree is to make sure you have a backup of your computer in case you do need to back out of it again.
Some like to boot from their installer discs or an external backup and verify (and if necessary repair) their internal drives as well as drive permissions. This is done with Disk Utility. You can verify a drive while booted from the same drive but sometimes this produces spurious errors. Repairing a drive (if necessary) has to be done while booted from another disk. Permissions repair can, and is probably best, done when booted from your internal drive.
[Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214]
[Using Disk Utility in Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302672]
[Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751]
You can also go to the step of booting into safe mode to do the install.
[Mac OS X: Starting up in Safe Mode|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393]
[What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? (Mac OS X)|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107392]
[Safe Boot takes longer than normal startup|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107394]
I like to download the update onto my computer and install it from there rather than let Software Update do it. I know a few people who had problems with doing the update via software updater found a manual install to work.
Repair permissions again afterward.
It also helps to only install one update at a time and to run the computer for a while to make sure it is behaving well.
Almost all of the above steps (except backup) have been questioned as to necessity because probably many people have done successful updates without doing them. I say they can't hurt, they can very likely do good (especially if your computer isn't regularly maintained), so why not do them to be safe.
[BDaqua's comments on updating problems|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8948595#8948595]