Every time Microsoft uploads an update, or patch, for its Windows operating system, your Windows 'media' goes out-of-date. Your Windows media is the CD or DVD (or it could simply be an ISO file) from which you install Windows onto your machines. And if you're anything like me and you like to keep your media up-to-date, you suddenly find yourself looking for the released updates and you start downloading them one-by-one.
Needless to say, that can be a daunting (to say the least) task. Often leading to confusions and frustrations and perhaps even, crashing your system entirely. Not to mention that, "as time goes on since the last service pack was released, the list of Windows updates tends to grow to be quite lengthy."
Enter
WUD, a free utility that will allow you to automate the download of Windows updates from Microsoft. Using WUD you can create "unattended Windows installations" which allows you to "integrate all of the latest updates into the installation and avoid spending hours waiting for the updates to download and install themselves after a fresh installation."
What you need to do is download the
WUD "program files" and run it at least once. You then download the
"update lists", which are simply a compiled list of updates for your selected software. You should end up with something that resembles that in Image 1 below. There are update lists for Windows 2000 through to Vista in addition to Office 2003 and Exchange 2003.
That's pretty much it, start downloading! You may want to configure the options a little, perhaps change the location to which the updates are downloaded. Once everything is downloaded you can "slipstream" the updates into your own DVD or CD. To do that you'll need
nLite for Windows XP or
vLite for Windows Vista, but that's another story.
You may want to run the updates you just downloaded one-by-one to update your system(s). Alternatively, you may use another utility to do that in an automated manner, namely AutoPatcher, but that's another article.
Happy downloading!
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