Windows Updates (another way)

[foxyloxley]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1621026,00.asp

The above link is to PCMag.

This is for those times when you or your 'friend' require to update, and you just know that at 56 kbs it's going to take for EVER.

this is the 'how to' of making your own update CD.
You will find an article about how to D/L the latest patches for your Win box, any flavour.
It does say that only IE will do it (?) but there is a good explanation, and it makes sense.

[But you don't need those CDs. You can make one yourself. Sort of. Through a little-known feature of the Windows Update site, you can download the updates yourself, individually, and apply them yourself. It's not perfect, and it's not as good as Windows Update or the Microsoft Update CD, but it has a lot of advantages over Windows Update for a lot of people. For example, when you first boot that machine up and go to Windows Update to install your security patches, you might well be attacked utilizing one of the vulnerabilities patched in the patches you haven't got to yet.]

[MilitantEidolon]

I didn't know that this was that special. I used to DL the updates off of the normal Microsoft site (cause I can do it through firefox) and then I would just burn them to a CD.

The downside is that the updates aren't automatic but that is the price you have to pay to stay away from both IE and to put them on others machines.

- MilitantEidolon

[foxyloxley]

Agreed, it's not special, just not too well advertised.
Hence it's in the newbie section.
As stated previously: I've managed to get the MS update CD, but this is only for MY OS W2KPro.
For my in laws, W98, dial up........ I am going to see what is there, I KNOW I'm going to need ALL of the available patches.
Which is where the good bit is, you can D/L any OS flavour required, and burn it yourself.

[djscribble]

when you make the cd you can batch them all together, and install them with only 1 restart -- make sure you use the /m /z switches (/m is so that it just applies them, you don't have to click anything and /z is no reboot)

also - make sure you have qchain.exe as the last command in your batch file. this makes it so that all the correct versions of the patch files get installed. (some patches patch a file, but a later patch, repatches the same file)

you will have to download qchain.exe from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

is says for win2k, but qchain works flawlessly under winxp. qchain functionality is integrated into all patches released after december 2002 so when sp2 finally comes out in august, qchain will be obsolete. qchain is not needed for server 2k3