Tag Archives: autopatcher

An alternative to autopatcher (heise offline update)

Computer Aid Posted on by

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.

Microsoft tries to kill Autopatcher

Computer Aid Posted on by

OK, I’m a few weeks late, but I’ve just realised that microsoft has effectively killed Autopatcher (autopatcher.com) in its current form.

I’ve found Autopatcher to be absolutely fantastic, when I need to reinstall XP (or do a fresh install), as it has saved me many gigabytes of downloads over the years.

Luckily, Antonis Kaladis is now looking at a way to resurrect autopatcher, so that microsoft cannot threaten autopatcher.

I just find it absurd that MS would move to prevent people from downloading Autopatcher, as it actually helps keep people “addicted” to windows… without it, Linux becomes an increasingly tempting alternative.

Even if a new autopatcher doesn’t materialise, the current Autopatcher has around 3 years worth of updates (and other useful extras), so I’ll be keeping and using my copy for a long time to come!