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April 4th, 2008

An alternative to autopatcher (heise offline update)

Since Autopatcher got hit by microsoft in July, I’ve been finding it increasingly annoying to have to download an increasing batch of updates after running autopatcher.

It seems like autopatcher is about to get a new lease on life (there seems to be some new beta software available), But I think I’ll wait until the software moves out of beta testing for now…

But, while looking around, I found a German company that seem to offer a similar product: Offline update (by heise security).

I’ve been meaning to try it out for a few months now, but I finally unpacked and ran the software. I then selected ”english XP updates”, and create a product iso image, and let it run for a while.

At some point, I noticed that the command prompt window was asking me “are you sure (Y/N)?

It looked like it was doing some cleaning up, so I just said “Y” a few times… so this is not as automated as I would have liked… it would have been nice to just run the offline update program, and come back later, to find an iso image ready to be burned to CD.

After a while, it generated an iso file, but it was 19MB… seems a tad small to me, but I’ll try it anyway.

But it only seems to install ie7… hmmm, something is wrong. I try again, but get the same results.

OK, I won’t waste any more time on this… so it looks like I’ll be taking a closer look at apup.exe (from autopatcher) sometime soon.

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Posted by Computer Help in Technical

3 Comments »

3 Responses to “An alternative to autopatcher (heise offline update)”

  1. Graham says:

    Hi
    head over to
    http://www.heise-online.co.uk/security/features/print/80682 for full instructions in english

    April 8th, 2008 at 11:23
  2. Computer Help says:

    Hi Graham,

    I did go through those instructions (with no luck).

    I’ll try it again at some point (maybe on a different PC) and see if I get different results.

    April 8th, 2008 at 13:00
  3. welo says:

    I know the article dates from a while back, but thanks to Google people might still stumble across it every now and then so I will comment on it.

    The Offline Updater project is actively maintained and improves constantly. I used it myself on several occasions (on english windows xp) and it always worked out for me. Even though it is still more like a ’script’ than a program it is easy enough to use and reliable.

    Every now and then the project needs to catch up with changes to the windows update service, but this is hardly avoidable.

    Btw the german company running the project is a reputable IT magazine. It now runs a huge UK website on security where the english version of the script is hosted.

    May 2nd, 2009 at 15:06

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