I am looking for a way to push applications and patches (spyware and virus updates, and switchless installs)to each of my pc's on my home network - I have 2 Media Center pc's and 4 XP boxes (one is a laptop) I do not wish to use MS system management server because that requires a domain and active directory, blah blah blah

Does anyone have any good suggestions for an app to replace this?

Or has anyone done a script for things like this?

http://wpkg.sf.net

http://ocsinventory.sf.net

Thanks a lot for the quick response, I will give them a try

hopefully it will make it easier to keep everyone's pc working and up to date.

just need to find a better packaging tool

How about:

http://www.sitekeeper.biz/systems-manageme...?pass=822317868

Not sure what cost is involved though.

Site Keeper costs about $400 for my small network. maybe I can find an extended trial version

OCS looks like it might work, had some trouble installing it last night but finally got it working (user error) takes a little learning curve to figure out but looks powerful (it uses apache server and MySQL) neat features too

as for WPKG, it looks like it requires active directory, will dig into it to see how I can configure it to work in a workgroup with no server installed just peer to peer XP boxes

I think OCS might be better but would like to use LAN Desk or Site manager if I could ag=fford it. Since I work for a large corporation, sometimes a can get a few free licenses for eval purposes. Thanks for the ideas and if you can come up with anu other suggestions I am still open on this subject

wpkg doesn't need an ADS. the group and package definition and all that is done through 3 XML files.

http://wpkg.org/index.php/How_WPKG_works%3F

I really not had the need to setup such a system at home, since I don't have that many PCs here. (actually only my T42 and my brothers virus distribution box.)