Autopatcher Alternative

We all know that guy that seems to do everyone's home based tech support. From close relatives to all the relative's friends, it seems this guy does everyone's PC and never seems to get paid. Though getting paid for fixing this does not really matter as this guy generally enjoys solving the problem and it's not what he does for a living. Well for now, I'm one of these guys and yesterday I was wanting to do the usual security updates to someone's PC as they do not want Microsoft's satanic crippler of PCs (Windows Genuine Advantage) and its not been done since July. So I go to grab the latest copy of Autopatcher but alas Microsoft's legal boys have put the breaks on this by sending them a big old friendly cease and desist putting an end to a great utility.

Autopatcher was a great download. You would download and install this and either create a CD for patching or run the program locally to patch the current PC. You could select what Microsoft (and others) patches, updates and essentials that you wanted to install, hit the button and watch it get on with the job... absolutely great for supporting other people in a quick way.

The good news is that it does not seem like Autopatcher is going away, a new version is currently in early beta that will download all the required files from Microsoft directly. However, since this is still in an early beta (if the content of the forums at the time of writing this is correct) and since I tend to only use software on other peoples machine that is not quite so hot off the press. You never know whether or not there is an issue just waiting to leap out at you so I tend to wait and let others take the fall and therefore I did not want to put such software near another person's PC quite yet. So the search was on for a stop gap alternative.

With a little bit of googling I found this offline update which is not as pleasing on the eye but is a neat little set of scripts that ties in to services that windows update uses to download the latest critical fixes and allows you to create a custom ISO file to burn or mount in order to patch the system of your choice.

The dialog is fairly self explanatory, just select what you want to be able to patch, whether or not you want the service packs included, if you want one big ISO or separate ones for each version of windows or office and then you simply start the scripts running, minimise and forget until in the end you get a dialog stating your ISO(s) are ready.

One advantage this program has over the traditional Autopatcher is that you can update your ISOs as soon as the updates are available via windows update.

One thing that is missing from offline update is the level of information you can get in what is about to install before it does which I imagine would make a big difference to someone wanting to deploy this to a lot of machines. Being able to review these things prior to the installation does mean that any show stopping fixes that you don't want can be removed right off the bat saving you some valuable time.

Personally I'm looking forward to further releases of Autopatcher. It was such a great utility before Microsoft decided to use the heavy mob letters and I'm betting it will be again, but until then this will keep me going nicely.

Edited 14th Jul 08 -- Updated the link to the offline updater