WSUS Offline Update

Windows users are well aware of the hassle that can be associated with Windows Updates, especially if they're running automatically and installing when they feel like it and shutting your PC down and rebooting with not that much notice. Also, every PC in the house suffers the same procedure, each one repeating the same download. If you don't want to go through all of this, go to this site and download this little piece of software. You can decide when to update and what to update, and the program will download any updates but NOT apply them until you choose. A big plus is that you can make a CD image (. Iso file) and burn the updates to it, or put them on a memory stick, and pass them around to anyone else who has the same Windows version. So nobody else in the family is stuck wasting time and bandwidth. Anyone with a not-strictly-legal copy of Windows might well benefit from offline updates too, but we won't go into that. Windows versions from 2000 are supported, as are Windows XP and Windows 7 servers. The final touch is that you can also use this to update MS Office alongside anything else you're updating, and it'll just get on and do the job whenever you like. The site is in German and English, with German being the primary language, but it's still easy to navigate and download the file. There is also a user forum in both languages if you want to find out more or get help. UPDATED: Sorry, I should have made this clearer, especially since the DOCS folder contents is entirely in German. There are two parts to this application, a downloader and an installer. The main folder contains the download part of the application, which is a program called UpdateGenerator. Exe. Running this will give you a comprehensive but easily understood tabbed window, and you may select whatever types of update you want. The program then goes off to Windows Update and downloads all the update programs. You don't need to see or understand this part any further, though there is a LOG file in the appropriate folder if you are curious. All the updates are stored in the CLIENT folder inside the main WSUSOFFLINE folder, but none of them are executed, just saved. Some other time when your PC is offline, just open that CLIENT folder and find a program in there called UpdateInstaller. Exe. Run that, and the installation part of the exercise will take place. During this procedure a DOS window will have also opened, you can recognize it because it's got a black background with white text on it and you probably won't be able to make any sense of that at all. Just wait until the text stops scrolling and you get a message to reboot your PC. That's the end of the installation part, unless you're told to reboot and recall, in which case reboot and then run the same program again. This is sometimes necessitated by an update that requires a reboot before others can be added. When you get the "reboot" without the "recall update" then you're done after that reboot.