I have just come back to this site with the intention of breathing new life into it and finally getting it out of the starting blocks. However I was faced with the ever fiddly task of updating the Drupal core plus a bunch of modules.
Thankfully before the apathy that has kept this site in limbo for years could manifest I realised this would be an excellent chance to try out the package manager features of Drush the command line interface for Drupal.
Basically, it's awesome.
Once set up, simply entering
drush up