7:00 AM
Paul B
Many moons ago I wrote about a tool that one could use to speed up Windows updates. It was called Autopatcher and it used to be awesome. Then they went away for a while, then came back and they just weren't as good anymore. At the time I didn't know of any other game in town. Well a tool called Portable Update popped up in 2008 that acts in many ways like Autopatcher used to and I just discovered them today!
From their page:
Portable Update is a windows-base tool for updating a Microsoft Windows computer in a isolated environment. This is useful in many circumstances:I decided to try it out today, and you know what? This thing rocks! It works on All versions of Windows from 2000 to Windows 8.1. It also works on servers! The rub is that it is free for personal use. If you want to use it for business you have to donate. No big deal thought right?
- When the computer reside on a secure lan isolated from internet;
- When the computer to update doesn’t have access or can't use a proxy server;
- When is necessary to completely update a fresh-formatted computer with the last update before to connect it to network;
- When the computer doesn’t have an hardware network connection at all;
- When the network connection speed is too low or it is necessary to update the computer very speedily;
- In all the other cases when is mandatory to have the complete control on the whole updating process without connecting the computer to the network.
I tried it out on my Windows 7 machine today and it sped up patching by 1000%! You can download all required updates in one shot and the installer is super fast. Way faster than trying to pull updates from WSUS or Microsoft Update! Plus, you can download all the updates into a local cache folder and copy them over to other servers including ones you leave offline for whatever reason. Once you have a local cache of updates, you don't need an internet connection!
I'm going to try this out in my production environment the next time I have to deploy patches. Right now, even when using WSUS, patching takes hours. I'm hoping to shorten that time to minutes with this tool.
Do you use Portable Update? Do you use another tool? What tool do you use? Let us know in the comments!
