Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: Dial up killer
Make Your own Offline Windows Update CD/DVD
Posted by on February 12, 2008
What a handy tool; if you download the app you can select which Microsoft OS/Applications you need patches for and it will download them all via the Windows online catalog to a source directory and then compile a script to auto install them all – it will even generate a .ISO file and handle dependencies and reboots – v.handy (and more efficient) if you need to quickly present it to a bunch of virtual machines with no Internet access or are on a site with slow internet access.
Excellent; now as far as I know Microsoft have no mechanism for doing this other than downloading all the patches manually… even with the Vista RTM images I built last week it had nearly 100Mb of OS patches alone!
Screenshot of the available options in the app – download it here here (updated 14th Sept’09)
OS Updates – multi-language too
Office Suite Updates too
You can even get all the patches for everything and it will compile it into a DVD .ISO image – I’ll definitely be using this – hopefully you can use the info it downloads to slipstream update a vista .WIM image – will have to try that in a couple of weeks.
(original link from a post on slashdot)
Windows Vista SP1 RTM
Posted by on February 4, 2008
Windows team Blog post here says Vista SP1 has been released to manufacturing so not long to go now until it’s generally available.
I’ve been using Vista exclusively since it RTM’d and from Beta 2 before that. I got a new laptop with a core 2 Duo CPU and went up to 4Gb RAM from 2 and it made a world of difference – much faster and in the last year my Dell D620 has been rock solid.
The file-copy hotfix worked for me; and a recent video driver update (automatically offered via Windows Update..nice) fixed the annoying screen mix-up when I docked my laptop.
Mark Russinovitch has an in depth post on the SP1 improvements to file copying here.
Does make you wonder if MS wanted/did bring forward the SP1 date because of all the “wait for SP1” brigade… M-m-m-m, marketing!
Not looked yet but I wonder how large SP1 will be, on the Vista desktops build I did recently I had to download c.300Mb of Windows (c.98Mb) & Office 2007 Updates (c.200Mb. good think I have a fast connection – you’ve got no chance on a PSTN dial up anymore!
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 