Grumble with Windows Update

Hi all
It's a bit annoying if you have say MS Office 2007 installed on 8 or 9 computers and need to update them.

Windows update makes you go through the rigmarole of downloading say 400 MB for SP1, installing that and then downloading another 400MB or so for SP2 ON EACH INDIVIDUAL MACHINE. (At least I can't find any option - if there is one I'd be greateful to know how to do it).

Windows update just does this. There isn't any option to download the updates to say a network directory and install them later manually.

Even in the age of High speed Internet its a waste to download this stuff every time for each machine.

If there's a piracy problem - the update could always check that both Office and W7 are genuine and have been activated before allowing the update to proceed.

Cheers
jimbo

Just update one machine. Then copy and paste the contents from it to all other machines before you update those. WU will not try to download and will use what you've put there.

The folder is

C:/Windows/SoftwareDistribution/Download/

Hi there
problem with that is there's just a totally confusing directory structure so you don't know what package belongs to what - and these aren't identical machines either. (screenshot enc)

Even if you find the .cab files (next level down in the directory) you don't know pre and post requirements so you'd need to copy the whole directory - a lot of stuff however might not be applicable to the target machines.

This would not in itself be totally destructive but it would clutter your system with a lot of unnecessary and possibly confusing "Update not needed" type of messages.

It's not the general updates that are a problem but major ones like Office SP1 / SP2 (and probably W7 SP1 when it appears).

These used to be available by individual download from the ms site for later installations.

Cheers
jimbo

in the case of service packs you can just download it from Microsoft download center. Then put it on a shared folder or USB drive or something, in order to move it from machine to machine.

You could always delete the entire contents of that folder safely to start fresh. Meaning, when there are new updates, you can copy/paste the entire folder contents knowing you're not copying something say, from like 6 months ago.

I do this with two very similar machines (software-wise.) After both are updated, I always delete the contents on both machines.

Hey, thanks Jacee.