why is os x lion downloading slow?

Needless to say the user needs access to their computer therefore the download of the update will have to be aborted.

That download does not "take over" the machine. It can be run in the background while other activities proceed in the foreground.

It does NOT lock up the machine.

App Store is now showing "3 days left" to finish download...

Then cancel it, discard the Application it is building in the Applications folder, and try again. The next time will likely be faster.

It is important to bear in mind that no ordinary users have administrative rights on the systems I manage.

All systems management and maintenance is carried out through a separate Admin account. In order for the users to do their work they need to be logged into their own accounts, hence the need to abort the download(s) being run under the Admin account.

Even if I were stupid enough to allow users administrative rights, the performance impact on the ability to access work over the network with such a large file downloading in the background would just result in a lot of severely cheesed off users.

I must admit, I'm not looking forward to the same scenario with Mountain Lion if Apple is going to persist with delivery of OSX and large applications and updates through the App Store. 😟

I had the same problem downloading Mountain Lion, so I left clicked on the downloading icon and paused the download, and then resumed it again, and immediately it started download at full speed. Either it's a bug or you simply end up downloading from a bad server some times. Pausing and resuming the download seems to do the trick.

Took a little over 6 hours

Here's what I did.

1) check your data for your cell phone.

2) if you have enough and can tether turn tethering on

3) connect computer to your cell phones tethering

4) be amazed at how drastically the download time changes.

Mine went from 17 plus hours down to 58 min!!

Ps,

srory if I spelled tether wrong..