Scheduling update downloads with Windows 7?

[bfollowell]

Well, I had eight wonderful years of high speed Internet goodness. It was a great run but it has ended. I remarried eighteen months ago and moved into my wife's (now our) beautiful home on the other side of town. Well, what I didn't realize was that it was just outside the city limits into the county and, even though we're not out that far, it might as well be the sticks as far as the Internet is concerned. There are no wired options at all. I've been back on dial-up for over a year and it is killing me. We've finally decided to go with HughesNet satellite Internet service for a couple of years in hopes that the local Ma Bell affiliate might get DSL into our area by the time our contract expires.

For those not familiar with HughesNet, they have a very small bandwidth cap. Our service plan has a cap of 425 MB per rolling 24 hour period. It'll be fine for general surfing but will rule out large downloads and updates. They do have a free window between 2 AM and 7 AM EST every day though and I have a download manager set to download only during the free window. The only problem I see is not being able to schedule Windows updates.

Is anyone aware of any way to "schedule" OS update downloads? It seems like Microsoft would've added this feature by now but it's never been there. You can pick when you want the updates to install but Windows pretty much downloads whenever it wants to, which sort of defeats the purpose here. Does anyone have any ideas or know of any third party tools that may help with this? Thanks for any info anyone might be able to provide.

Sincerely,
- Byron Followell

 

[Petey7]

Yes. Go to updates in Control Panel. Click change settings. From there you can schedule it to run when you want it to. Looking at mine, it shows 3am as the default, so all you should have to do is set it to automatic.

 

[bfollowell]

Thanks but, no, that doesn't allow you to schedule the downloads. That's what I was referring to. What you're talking about let's you schedule the time that the updates are installed, not when they're downloaded. Windows will still download these updates whenever it wants to and will then install them at 3 AM. Go back again and read the text of the options and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Because of my low bandwidth cap and my free window, I'm concerned with when the updates are actually downloaded. I couldn't care less when they're installed.

Thanks.

- Byron

 

[Petey7]

The only other thing I can suggest is to set it to ask before downloading updates, then run them once or twice a month on days you know you won't use it much. I really don't know of any scheduler besides the one I mentioned above. Sorry

 

[bfollowell]

No problem. You tried. Maybe someone else will know of a trick or a thrid party tool that will help me accomplish what I need. Thanks for trying.

- Byron