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Using Offline Update:
(This article is written in reference to Offline Update v5.1 – it should remain relevant for other versions.)
It’s a two step process. First, you need to run the Offline Update tool, tell it what updates you’re interested in, and tell it to go and download them from Microsoft.
This process can take quite a bit of time, but you only need to do it once (or, at least, once for each new version of the Offline Update tool – about every 3-5 months or so).
At the end of this first step, Offline Update produces .iso image files (you’ll find them in the “ctupdateiso” directory) that you can burn to disc. Because I’m extending this I usually extract the created .iso images to combine with the other things I use on my build disc.
The second step is using the Offline Update installer to actually install updates on a target computer. The installer is smart enough to figure out what updates are already installed and skip over them. Depending on your configuration selections, this will work for Windows 2000, Windows XP (32 and 64 bit), Windows Server 2003 (32 and 64 bit), Windows Vista (32 and 64 bit) and Windows Server 2008. It will also handle Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007. That’s a pretty comprehensive set of updates if you choose to use them all.
In my case, we only rarely handle Windows 2000, Office 2000 and Office XP so I don’t configure Offline Update to download these updates. In my experience, a computer using these versions is probably reaching replacment rather than repair status anyway.
Offline Update makes use of Update.cmd to apply all the updates. It can be found in the “client” sub-directory of whereever you extracted the ctupdate archive. If you prefer, you can leave all these files on a network share and just run Update.cmd from there. I prefer to combine it into my overall build disc and burn off a number of copies of the disc instead. This way I don’t have to worry as much about overloading the network if I’ve got a lot of computers all doing updates at the same time.
This pretty much covers the subject of Windows updates. In the next installment it’s time to look at the extra utilities that I have in our standard build/install.
