From: "Geo" 

"Glenn Meadows"  wrote in message
news:42fb978f{at}w3.nls.net...

> I thought part of the discussion was in locations that needed to pull the
> patches over a slow link for each computer.

there could be lots of reasons not to use windowsupdate, the reason is
unimportant, pick one and then try to deal with the manual patch method and
how to improve it.

> I've had great luck with the free SUS and now WSUS's running internally on
> one of our servers.

I paid for hfnetchkpro5 for my automated method of choice (since it patches
things like winzip as well as the MS stuff) but assume that for whatever
reason there is a huge set of machines for which these methods are
unacceptable. Personally I'm just not willing to give MS my personal
inventory for them to market at some later date but that's not why so many
others pick the manual method. So instead you download the manual patches
and apply them one at a time.

Why does that manual method need to be so difficult? MS releases 6
different august patches, most of those 6 come as separate versions, one
for W2K, one for XP, one for 03, one for XP64 and one for 03/64. That's 30
different files to track just for august alone. What, they couldn't turn
that into a single exe or two or even 5?

As of right now, using the manual method, you have 28 files for W2K (and we
just had a rollup), 33 more for XP, and 51 for Server03, sorry but I don't
do 64 bit patches (yet) so I don't know how many there. Doesn't that seem
kind of insane to you? I mean remember the old days when OS/2 had what 15
fixpacks and everyone way saying how nice and easy it was for NT because
all you had to do was apply the latest service pack and you were up to
date? What do you think people would have said if OS/2 had 51 fixpacks?
Course that's back when MS actually was listening to customers instead of
selling us out to every corp who want's to exploit us and IBM was ignoring
us in favor of their "we know best, let them eat squatty fonts"
attitude.

Funny how things change, isn't it?

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5