Windows Update Catalog downloads

I have long used Microsoft's old corporate Windows Update website to download individual updates and patches to be applied across multiple standalone PC's. Some are Internet connected via dial-up, some are not. It was easy and convenient to download the update once, burn it to CD-R, and then use that CD to update multiple machines. The premise for Microsoft was to make it easy for corporate users to update multiple networked PC's. But it worked equally as well for individuals supporting multiple PC's in multiple locations, with or without Internet access. Microsoft dropped the separate corporate Windows Update download website, and integrated the same functionality into the Windows Update Catalog website. It can be accessed with WinXP from the Windows Update site http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/, or directly from http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/catalog. For those not familiar with the Windows Update Catalog, you can read Microsoft's KB Article on it at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=323166.

With the old system, I could download multiple updates, organize and index them, burn them to CD-R and later easily find the appropriate update and load it on an as needed basis. With the change to the new Catalog website, and with the sheer volume of updates MS regularly posts, this is not so easy anymore. When you download updates to your computer, the files are stored in a somewhat logical series of folders. In most cases, it is not possible to determine the contents of the folder except by the KB article number which is sometimes part of the folder name. A ReadMore.htm file is located in the folder, but it is merely an Internet shortcut to a file on the Microsoft website. Therefore you have to be online to read it. An index file (iuhist_catalog.xml) is installed in the directory where you downloaded the files, and another index file (iuhist_catalogAdmin.xml) is stored in the \Program Files\Windows Update\V4 directory. The problem is, the index files store the full path to where you originally downloaded the files. This is useless after you burn the files to CD-R. When you run Windows Update from the target computer, there is no way to use this index file to browse for updates that you have already downloaded, and have on CD. If I try to view the .xml index file in Internet Explorer, I see the complete text with XML code, not a rendering of the index page in XML, which is very difficult to read with all the XML tags. Can anyone suggest how to better manage downloads from the MS Windows Update Catalog site?

Todd Beaver

 

stbeaver--Thanks for the info.
The Catalog site will work for all versions of Windows starting with Win98. However, your link has the period included, so does not work--at least not for me. This link should
http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/catalog/en/

 

Moderator: I noticed that this message post has an odd icon in the left most column. The icon is an envelope with a red dot on it. My interpretation of this icon is that the topic is sealed or locked. I could not find a definition of these icons in the BBS help. But I noticed that my post appeared to be the only one I could find notated in this manner. What does this mean?