Saving Window XP Updates?

[lago]

I am having to rebuild my hard drive and am unable to save the updates to use again, if/when I rebuild again. I usually do it every other year or so to clean it up.

Anyhow, I reloaded Windows ME and XP upgrade and now Microsoft wants to download over 50 meg of updates, all at one time. Can't find a way to selectively download a portion at a time, since I am on dial-up at 26.4K max and it will take an estimated 14 hours. Sure hate to tie the phone line up that long.

I came across a write up in a PC mag about a year or so ago for the method of doing that but it doesn't give me all the updates that I need. I think the Microsoft has probably changed the download process since then.

Anyone have any suggestions. BTW, I am rebuilding to a spare smaller hard drive and will then do a disk copy to my larger hard drive.

Ken

[JoeyGee]

Wow, sorry to hear about the dial-up. That's rough. I don't mean to rub it in, but more and more it's a broadband world. MS is not going to make it easy for those on DU.

That being said, I would turn off automatic updates (if you haven't already) and just go to the downloads section of MS.com and search manually:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/B...9-0C56CD979D05

and do them one by one. It will take time, but will save you frustration. Maybe you could do this somewhere with a faster connection and save them to a CD?

I know uninstall info for all SP's and updates are stored in the C:\Windows directory, but I doubt that would do you any good.

[parnelli]

What your'e looking for are the network install packs.

Here's the sp1a one:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/d...1/network.mspx

Save them to a disc or a separate partition, and you won't need to go thru the download routine again. SP2 is available like this as well, as are the service packs for MS office if you run that as well.

Also, you shouldn't need to install ME first. Run the XP upgrade disc and when it says it can't find the qualifying previous operating system, swap out the xp disc for the ME one point it to it, and then swap them back again once it's read the ME disc.

Lastly, you could borrow a copy of Ghost (or similar) from someone and make a ghost of your newly completed install and then you can just restore from that in the future without having to reinstall each and every program.

ps- if you don't have someone local that can download those sp's for you on highspeed, pm me your address and I'll throw them on a cd for you.

[JSUPreston]

Autopatcher

Hopefully this forum can help. Supposedly updated regularly with all the patches located in a central file that you can burn to cd and update with. Hope you can download at a location with DSL/Cable/T1 and a cd burner.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showforum=89

Edit: I think this would be a better place to look now that I've done a little more digging around.

http://www.autopatcher.com/downloads/

[25]

Just search for patch+redistributable on MS's site. All theire updates come in a plain exe format. They mainly do this for network adimns I beleive. I still prefer todo my updates this way though.