Offline updates spend enormous time "searching for updates on this..."

[paul1149]

Offline updates spend enormous time "searching for updates on this..."

I do a lot of offline updating from my own store. Many of the updates prepare for installation by "searching for updates to this computer". I suppose this is to examine the need for and suitability of the update. The first update searches pretty quickly, but then it's very slow - something like 5 to 10 minutes for each one. I think rebooting after each update would solve the problem, but that's not practical.

I encounter this on every Win7 machine I work on. Why do these updates take so much time scanning, and what can be done about it?

 

[NoelDP]

Rather than doing offline updating, why not set up a WSUS server, and point the clients at that for their updates? this has the benefit of automatic collection to the store, and controlled distribution to the clients, as well.

 

[paul1149]

I hadn't thought of that. Currently I use WSUSOffline as far as it goes, but then I have a lot of large dotnet and IE11 updates which I do manually. Finally I do online updates from MS to polish it off. I need to look into this, but the first question I have is whether setting up my own server would be any better than WSUSOffline with regard to storing the large dotnets and IE11 updates.

Thanks Noel,
Paul

 

[paul1149]

Some observations:

It seems very complicated. I'd have to set up a server, I'd have to purchase a MS server OS, and then I'd have to navigate their per-unit server license scheme. That seems difficult, because I have a steady flow of different machines coming through here.

I'm not sure I'm seeing this correctly.