Upgrading Wordpress over a dial-up
One of the things I hate about transferring files over sftp is that it’s awfully slow. Trying a Wordpress upgrade file by file, from a dial-up line, using sftp, can be a very foolish thing to do. At least, as far as the amount of time and effort, this task takes (read timeouts, multiple sessions, et al).
If you’re on a dial-up (or even connecting via a decent broadband), then the best and painless way to upgrade is via SSH. (Subversion is a far cooler method, but your domain server needs to be set-up for this.)
I use a combination of Smartftp and PuTTY (the SSH client). SmartFtp to upload the tar file to a temporary folder on my host. PuTTY for extracting the tar.gz file archive and writing over old wordpress files. Detailed instructions on howto do this are on Codex.