After not going to Windows Update for many moons, I decided to give it a look.

Now I have WinXP SP1 installed but was alarmed to see about 30 updates still available on the site.

I am still a pitiful modem dweller at home and can't be bothered d'loading the specific updates at work, burning them etc.

Obviously the next question has to be - how long until SP2 and why, if there are so many "critical" or "req'd" updates available is my computer not calling itself "Apple IIc" and spitting pacman characters from every output device.

8)

As far as I know, SP2 for XP hasn't even entered beta yet, and judging by how long SP1 took to go through beta, I can't imagine that we'll be seeing SP2 much before June/July.

As for what's critical or not, that's really for you to decide. I've noticed that a lot of the most recent updates have been the type where a malicious hacker could take over your PC...can't say they'd find anything of interest on mine!!
And if you're only on dial-up, I'm sure you'd notice if someone tried!!

Rgds
AndyF

Download the trial of UpdateExpert and download all of the updates for XP. Then burn the updates to CD.

DosFreak, thanks for a head's up on that product... Downloading now!

I would imagine (not having looked at the specific updates available) that this would be due to MS' new security initiative... Any thoughts?

Do you mean the amount of security updates? Then yes of course but fortunately..or sometimes unfortunately MS has always been pretty good about updating their OS's.

Thanks for posting this thread felix. I've always made Norton Antivirus Corporate available to my users so that they can take it home but I haven't made any M$ updates available. I'll have to figure out a good way to organize and make them easily useable to the user but once I do I'll make them vailable to my users to take home.

Proving the latest SP and any post Hotfixes should be enough but I'll have to decide wether I want them to upgrade SP levels or not. I may just provide instructions for determining SP level and then apply a QCHAIN....nah latest SP level and post hotfixes QCHAIN and then recovery instructions if things go wrong should do it....

Sounds like you're a very dedicated sysadmin.

I too have not checked the updates in a while but this time when I went there I got a strange message saying that the update software needed to be updated after it tried to scan for updates. After clicking "update now" it claimed it was downloading and installing a newer update software but when it was done it was ask me to "update now" again. Over and over. Weird. I tried looking under help/support and troubleshoot but nothing suggested helped.

EDIT - Problem solved. I had a service diabled and didn't realize it. Must have been when I was trying to weed out what I didn't need one night to get XP to run better and reduce my lag.