johnthomson

Hello, My first posting - I hope I'm in the right place... What I'm trying to do: I'm looking for a way to manage distributing Windows XPpro hotfixes to a bunch of XPpro computers which are not connected to the internet (or to each other). I do support for various people and organisations in Africa, and many users don't know about hotfixes and don't have an internet connection in this region. I'd like to be able to download all hotfixes (the WindowsXP-KB??????-ENU.exe files), burn a CD, and update each computer with the correct set of fixes. I've done this successfully with XP SP2, but I don't have a good way to do the hotfixes. What I've learned: From Microsoft.com, I found a tool called qfechecker, but it looks old and nobody seems very keen on it nowadays, so I abandoned it. Then I found nlite (from nliteos.com) and windizupdate (from 62nds.com) which are both good and clever, but neither are what I need. Finally, I found a thread here on MSFN (http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=40838) where someone has written a script to automate the installation stage. In short, it runs through a list (compiled by hand) of hotfixes, checks they are not already installed, and installs them with the appropriate command line switches. It's not professional level stuff (the author admits so himself), although it's the best I've seen so far (and because I can see and control what it's doing, I like it). It can not be: Surely I am missing something obvious - I can't believe there isn't a nice tool to do this ? Rather, I'm surprised that there aren't loads of people trying to do what I'm doing. Can anyone advice how I should proceed ? Thanks in advance, john