I've been on the Philips site and looked at the instructions but it might as well be in Greek for all the sense it made.
Are these upgrades necessary and is there another way of getting them

Well that rather depends on what information you care to give us. There's an update for the 7300/05 for the 21st June 2006, but if yours isn't misbehaving or you bought it recently then you may not need it.

What's the country code of your 7300 (/xx)?

I know what you mean Jays, The method I use is as follows.
download the update from the philips website, unzip it to it's own folder using Winrar, using Nero burning softwear, insert a blank Cdr ito your writer, in the menus find create a bootable disk, do that, then nero will take you to the add files section, navigate to your saved unzipped philips update, select that, next your options page, make sure the add more files is unticked & Burn.....
It works for me!
Bob Hutton