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On windows 7 I used to do the following

Turn off auto updates

WSUS Offline Update patches your win 7 guder and more selectively than MS patcher:

http://download.wsusoffline.ne...

The bigger problem I've run across with clients still running XP (isolated from the Internet) is that Microsoft no longer allows you to update it over the Internet (aside from a registry hack to trick Microsoft into thinking it's an embedded system). So if you ever need to wipe and reinstall, you end up with an older version of XP and no way to update it automatically. You have to know to manually download the last service pack and install it yourself. And I'm not sure how to install any updates which were released after the last service pack.

For the first part regarding wipe/reinstall, the best option is to make a full drive image backup, ideally right after the system is setup fully and ready to be deployed to production, but before actually being deployed and used.

I believe Norton Ghost used to be the "gold standard" for this, but personally I use CloneZilla as it is open source and does the same thing.
If you need a premade boot-disk with CloneZilla on it, I use one called PartedMagic. It's not free any longer, they request a donation to download the image, but even so I find it so useful I've paid for it for work use.

For the automatic update part, you're correct in that you can't update it over the Internet without hacks. However you can update it "offline" with a few tools available freely online.

One nice one is http://download.wsusoffline.net/
You run the software on a newer Windows PC and it goes to fetch the update files and dependencies for the OS version you tell it (Some software too like Office, although that probably doesn't apply here)

After you have the updates, you can copy them to a USB drive or dvd-r along with a script it builds, over to the target machine. The script installs them in the correct order for you.

While this is a lot more manual than windows update was, it's nice in that it fully works around the separation between Internet downloading and update installing, so you don't have to break your network isolation.
The downside is of course using it with more than a handful of computers. But in the case of XP, it isn't like you'll do it more than once, as there is rarely anything new to go download and get to be installed these days.

There is also "WHDownloader", seems pretty popular on a forum I frequent as a similar option as above, but I've never used it.

If your XP machines have partial LAN access, or at least can reach one Windows Server, you can use Microsofts official WSUS server software still.
It's free as in beer, but primarily intended to be integrated with your Windows domain via group policy, and basically act as a cache/proxy for updates to all the clients that get pointed to it.
But you can also manually add the registry key with the URL to it instead of joining the domain.

That option works 100% automated and just like windows updates so far as the client PC knows.
In WSUS you have to go through and approve or deny each update, but all approved ones are picked up by the client PCs normal windows update process and installed from the WSUS server.
You can easily manage thousands of PC updates this way, and the one and only thing downloading them from Microsoft is the WSUS software itself.

Have you tried something called WSUS Offline? I've used it to fix issues like this with domain PCs

http://download.wsusoffline.ne...

Have you tried a third party Windows Update program? I have used wsusoffline a few times for machines that don't like to do the regular Windows Update for some reason. At least once, it fixed a situation similar to yours.

It's up to you to trust it, but it works for me. http://www.wsusoffline.net/

I've had machines locked in this process where they don't actually seem to be installing updates. I fixed it by using an offline updater, this one to be exact; http://www.wsusoffline.net/

You can try with WSUS offline updater

you can try this: http://download.wsusoffline.ne... its worked for me before. Good luck!

I've been using WSUS Offline Update to build update ISOs and never touching the Windows Update site directly for years now. Just recently a Windows Update (or some other mechanism) made my Windows screen display 'This copy of Windows is not genuine'. Since it happened in the last several months, it's time to reinstall and use the Windows 7 update ISO that I created a few months ago. I'm glad I date and keep the ISO images.

I don't know which recent update from Microsoft tagged my copy of Windows 7 as 'non-genuine' but if I stop doing updates and freeze things at a recent point where they snuck in whatever WGA crap they've done, I am probably okay.

Does anybody know when they crept in the new WGA malware update? It was apparently something in the last three or four months.

Pssst....WSUS Offline or Autopatcher and Bob's your uncle, no need to do any hacking...oh and you're welcome ;-)

Pssst....WSUS Offline or Autopatcher and Bob's your uncle...oh and you're welcome ;-)

turn off some of the crap with this..
https://www.oo-software.com/en...

maybe even disable updates completely and use this...
http://download.wsusoffline.ne...
to download updates and an update installer separately.

and of course... disable all the "live tiles" or delete/unisntall their respective apps, and use this for a start menu...
http://classicshell.net/

if you need a pop/imap mail client, consider mozilla thunderbird or even seamonkey instead of the piece-of-shit mail "app" in win10. note that the popular mail client in "live essentials" is end-of-life and no longer updated/fixed.
https://mozilla.org/thunderbir...
http://seamonkey-project.org/

yes, it is.

http://download.wsusoffline.ne...

only the actual security updates (and optional things like mse, runtimes, etc), no bullshit.

Use an Offline Update Downloader to create an ISO. Run the ISO's installer to update Windows 7. Do this as frequently as you feel is necessary. Turn Windows Update completely off in the Windows 7 Control Panel.

The nice thing is, you archive your updates this way. I ran the Offline Update Downloader the day they turned off Windows XP updates and made a final update set for XP. Any time I see the need to build an XP system, pull out the ISO and run it on the new XP install.

--You can speed up Win7 updates A LOT just by using WSUS Offline Update. Download once, burn to DVD and update the client PC with that.

--Win7 "official" update process is horribly broken and CPU intensive, to the point where the CPU fan on a laptop I inherited had basically failed due to 100% continuous use.

http://www.wsusoffline.net/doc...

--Note that you may have to run the WSUS updater on the client multiple times and reboot/repeat, but this is still *much* better than doing it the traditional way. After updating, I'd recommend doing a full bare-metal backup with Veeam or Aomei or the like.

Just turn off Windows Update and use WSUS Offline

this.

it has been an occasional go-to tool for me for years now.. but promoted to full-time status now. due to this change by microsoft.

best part is, for those unlucky enough to need it.. windows 10 support. so disable that persistent windows update service on windows 10 and use *THIS* when you want to update, and on the connection you want to use to download up to 4 gigabytes at a crack on.. not when windows wants to (which is, like, all the fucking time).

The Convenience Rollup is kept on my keyring USB stick as its just soooo much easier than dealing with a system that may not have had a patch on it in years.

And as far as these new crap "mega updates"? Just turn off Windows Update and use WSUS Offline which last I checked is doing just as you described and grabbing the manual security updates, only you get them nicely bundled with a script that will install them all (and do any reboots required) and shut down the system, hassle free. I highly recommend it.

We'll see what happens, but for now I've taken the precaution of using WSUS Offline to download all updates as of today. If I ever need to install Windows 7 again I have my original disc (and backed up ISO on cloud storage) and I can use the update installer from WSUS Offline to apply the updates I downloaded without ever needing to put the computer on the Internet. (And yes, this tool lets you add specific updates to an exclusion list so that they don't get installed).

that's only step one...

step 1. turn off updates

step 2. disable the annoying action center notification that you did step 1...

step 3. download and install updates on at least a semi-regular basis using http://download.wsusoffline.ne...

step 4. tell microsoft to 'fuck off'

i am DONE with fucking around with *brand new installs* and fresh factory restores of windows that have broken windows updates. it doesn't matter if you skip everything and just do service pack first, or do the new windows 7 cumulative update that was just released.. or let windows update do everything on its own in the background.. IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK. the update fixit doesn't "fixit", the tweaking.com repair tool used to work sometimes... but not often enough... so that's it. FUCK MICROSOFT.

if they can't deliver the updates reliably, and ONLY the ones i want, then FUCK THEM. i will use my own method of obtaining the important updates, and one with a much longer track record of *success* than microsoft's own delivery methods. and it's portable, too. download all the (actually important) updates for every supported windows and office in one shot, stick them on an external and no more hassles with cryptic windows update errors and absolutely useless support articles, forum posts and other totally off-base, wrong, doesn't work worth shit 'solutions'...

the really sad part is, the third-party wsus offline updater USES WINDOWS UPDATE AGENT CLIENT SIDE to determine whether an update applies and if its already installed.. and it WORKS, unlike the actual windows update function in windows.

the last windows 7 sp1 install i did that actually worked for windows update.. ran the update check for FOUR AND A HALF FUCKING DAYS, and it wasn't exactly one of netbook performance levels either.

and ya know, windows 10's "cumulative" take-ever-update system doesn't work for shit, either... better but still shitty and broken half the time... but with no control and less data presented to the user so they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on.

You guys know about WSUS Offline Update, don't you? Download all the patches and install them offline. Much quicker than letting Windows download them piecemeal (and obviously can be used to update machines that don't have a fast internet connection).

You know that this doesn't work, right? The offline servicing model can't patch certain things, and it doesn't know which it can't patch.
For example, certain updates that require a reboot cannot be patched together via offline servicing. You have to install one set of updates, then process the next. It's on YOU to figure out which ones conflict.

In my experience, WSUS Offline Update (http://www.wsusoffline.net/) does handle that:
When it hits the point where it cannot proceed because a previous update is not fully installed yet, it will display a message that tells you to reboot the computer and restart the update installer. Which can be a bit tedious, but still gets the job done.

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit, German version.

Tried to install the "convenience rollup" on my machine. Got the message "Dieses Update ist nicht fuer Ihren Computer geeignet" ("This update is not suitable for your computer").
Note that I could get it only through Microsoft Update Catalog in the first place, so a user error in picking the wrong version seems pretty unlikely..

Between this and other users' posts that warn about the rollup containing all the telemetry and GWX crap, I've deleted the useless update now and will go back to WSUS Offline Update (http://www.wsusoffline.net/). Semi-on topic, there are also some third party hints on how to speed up patching of a Windows 7 reinstall:
At http://wu.krelay.de/en/, the author lists a few updates that are supposed to accelerate the search for missing updates, if you install them manually before starting the search. I've not tried it myself yet, as I don't want to reinstall Windows just to try it out. But other users seem happy with the advice.

You guys know about WSUS Offline Update, don't you? Download all the patches and install them offline. Much quicker than letting Windows download them piecemeal (and obviously can be used to update machines that don't have a fast internet connection).

You know that this doesn't work, right? The offline servicing model can't patch certain things, and it doesn't know which it can't patch.
For example, certain updates that require a reboot cannot be patched together via offline servicing. You have to install one set of updates, then process the next. It's on YOU to figure out which ones conflict.

Certain updates cannot be applied via offline servicing at all.

Other updates won't be detected as necessary until other updates are installed, such as those for later versions of IE or WMP. If you process an IE11 update before processing the update that installs IE11 itself, the IE11 update will never be applied unless you specifically know to reprocess it. If you are trying to build a clean image offline, your shit still needs to be updated the instant you boot it and install Office WhateverYearItIs.

The ONLY way to handle building a clean Windows image is to use a VM with Windows installed and booted into System Audit mode, then patched each Patch Tuesday. If you want to DEPLOY this image (actually use it), you need to snapshot your VM, then run Sysprep with the Shutdown and Generalize options. Then you have a VM ready to be captured via boot media, PXE, or whatever.
THEN you roll back your snapshot to undo the Sysprep, Generalize step, which subtracts 1 from your rearm counter. If you don't do this, you're fucked after the third time. There's a way to blow out chunks of the registry via the command line if you boot to the system recovery console, and you can reset the Rearm counter, but as of January 2016 this doesn't actually fix the issues with deploying and authenticating Windows 7 from that image. I don't know what else MS added to detect tampering to the rearm counter, but it wasn't worth my time to figure it out. I am now resigned to maintaining and coddling a Windows 7 image in a VM because MS is shit.

You guys know about WSUS Offline Update, don't you? Download all the patches and install them offline. Much quicker than letting Windows download them piecemeal (and obviously can be used to update machines that don't have a fast internet connection).

So far it should be sufficient to limit Windows Update to "important" updates but don't let it collect "recommended" updates. KB3035583 is only "recommended", not "important".

If you don't trust Microsoft even that far, you could switch off Windows Update and use a third-party tool like WSUS Offline Update instead (http://www.wsusoffline.net/) which will do essentially the same, with some extra blacklisting by the maker of WSUS Offline Update.
Obviously this means trusting some guy on the internet more than Microsoft, but WSUS Offline Update has a good reputation so far and my own experience with it is positive.

They never released a rollup / service pack at XP EOL. Windows update servers still remain active for EOL versions. Just no new updates. Regardless WSUS Offline will let you build a backup of available updates.

Have a look at WSUS Offline. It does more or less what you're asking for, although you do have to run the collector and client manually every post patch Tuesday.

Not if you use WSUS Offline Update to update your systems. As far as I know, it sticks to getting the genuine security updates and skips all of that "telemetry" garbage and Win10 nags. I don't ever trust the built in Windows Update anymore. I block Microsoft hosts on all computers except the one that downloads the updates with WSUS Offline.

You should also disable the "Customer Experience Improvement Program" (or better yet, strip it out entirely with something like NTLite). Actually, I've found it best to just wipe all scheduled tasks in the registry after a clean install of Win7.

For Windows machines, I use WSUS Offline. It also comes in handy when I'm at a customer site and their internet is so slow that I can't patch a single machine in a day. Yes, there are still areas of the world where DSL is sold less than a Mbps download.

There are often tricks you can use. Most public libraries have open WiFi with relatively high speed connections.

You can use an offline updater like http://www.wsusoffline.net/ on a high speed connection somewhere and produce 'update rollup' DVD rom disks to install updates on machines with slow connections. I made a Windows XP update DVD image on the last day of Windows XP support.

You don't have to wait for MSFT, just use WSUS Offline. I've used it for many years, in fact I still have the WSUS Offline .ISOs for Win2K and WinXP and it works like a charm, lets you use DVDs or USB sticks, will even include .NET and Office if you like. Oh and you're welcome ;-)

WSUSOffline will do what you want:
http://download.wsusoffline.ne...

You need an old version (9.2.1) to get XP support. Basically pick what updates you want, then it will download it, and build it in a form that basically you can double click the installer and it will run the updates.

If you need to automate the process you can use WSUSOfflineUpdate, it can download all the patches and will let you install them without a network connection and it has a automatic reboot and recall mode, so you don't have to babysit the computer and reboot and restart when updates require it. I did have some problems initially with that feature of WSUSOfflineUpdate on Windows 7, but when not creating a password for the initial user I created and also copying the folder with the updater and its files to Public Documents* it has been working flawlessly. There were still some updates left to install after it had run, and it still takes ages to install all the updates, but all in all much better than doing them through Windows Update when you have multiple machines to do.

* as the auto reboot and recall feature creates its own user copying them somewhere that isn't publicly accessible may (possibly) be a problem, though directly from a USB drive I think would be fine, I just didn't have enough USB drives spare for all the machines I was installing and updating

You might want to try http://www.wsusoffline.net/ if something similar arises in the future.

Try WSUS Offline Update, you can make a DVD that will update a fresh install of XP to be fully patched.

http://www.wsusoffline.net/

http://www.wsusoffline.net/docs/

Try WSUS Offline Update, you can make a DVD that will update a fresh install of XP to be fully patched.

http://www.wsusoffline.net/

http://www.wsusoffline.net/docs/

Or if he is constantly doing installs and doesn't want to keep having to burn .ISOs he can just use WSUS Offline dropped into a share folder on his network and call it a day. I have a copy on my network and it has everything from XP and Office 2K3 to Win 8.1 and Office 2K10 on it and between that and Ninite the amount of time it takes to go from bare metal to fully patched and ready to go has dropped right off the map. What is nice is the fact you can just flip UAC off and have it run fully unattended, just run it and it'll take care of any reboots required and fully patch the system, install the latest IE and DirectX as well as .NET and Office patches if you want, easy peasy.

I created the anchor tag but then omitted to past the link into it. The Offline Update tool I use is located here .

You are most welcome and if you haven't heard of them before let old Hairy turn you on to a couple of other "shop guy tricks", specifically WSUS Offline and Ninite.

These two little life savers can take the time from starting a windows install to finished and ready to go from several hours to less than an hour and a half. You use WSUS Offline to download all the updates, service packs, as well as DirectX,IE, and .NET updates and then just slap that sucker onto a USB drive (or in the case of the shop a share drive on the LAN) and let it go, takes all the hassle out of taking a Windows system from fresh install to ready to go. Works on XP- Win 8.1 so it doesn't matter which one you are using either.

And Ninite? Ohhh you are gonna love Ninite, he is the PC fixit guy's best buddy. With ninite all your major third party software is taken care of, you've got browsers and codecs and media players and antivirus and IMs and pretty much all of the stuff your average person wants, with Ninite you just check the boxes and go. oh and NO TOOLBARS, no extras, none of the crap that so many programs drag along these days, just a clean unattended install of the latest version of whatever you picked. As an added bonus if you need to update and aren't sure if your software is out of date? just check the boxes and run it, Ninite will only install if you have the older version.

So there ya have it, with that and the little 3 step I posted earlier you can take a PC from bare metal to grandma proof in no time flat, enjoy!

WSUS Offline may solve your problem.

I'm sorry friend but I gotta throw a flag, 15 yard penalty for ignorance on the field. You get the occasional explorer hang NOT because "MSFT didn't sweat the details" but because you are talking about literally tens of thousands of hardware combinations that it HAS to work on, and considering my win 7 systems have been running happily in the field since Sept 09? I'd say they did a DAMN good job at that. With win 8 Ballmer made them bolt metro, or as i call it "Tweeting Twits for Shits" and between that and all the phone home DRM garbage it makes it buggy. Just one more reason to avoid Win 8 like a kick in the balls IMHO.

I mean just look at what my GF is using while i put together a new system for her, a late gen P4 with HT, 2GB of RAM, and an HD2400XT OEM card by Dell and you know what? Runs Win 7 like a charm, no crashes, no hangs, in fact when i got over there for supper tonight she told me "It won't let me get my pics off my camera" and when i had her show me what it was doing I had to tell her "Honeybunch its pulling the pics off and dropping it in your picture folder the second you plug it in, you don't have to "do" anything, it just works" because she couldn't believe that it could just magically do all the work that fast without her having to jump through hoops. But I'd say the UI for Win 7 is VERY consistent, its the UI for win 8 that is a damned mess and again that is because of Tweeting twits For Shits, or TTFS for short. Instead of doing the SMART move and making a UI for mobile and one for desktop they tried to make a jack of all trades and not only is it the master of none it drools and kinda smells bad.

As for your Windows Update or WU error? No offense dude but "Your doin it wrong" if you use WU for updates. Don't ask me why but about a year after the release of Win 7, which would put it right around the time you had your problem, some numbnuts at MSFT decided to put pretty much every damned hotfix ever created into the "optional" section of WU without telling people those are just that OPTIONAL and should NOT be used unless you have the SPECIFIC problem it addresses. A MUCH better way to update Windows, and this covers XP- Win 8, both desktop and server if you desire, is to use the free WSUS Offline which will apply ONLY the updates that apply, no optional crap, hell it'll even update WMP, IE, DotNET and DirectX if you want it to. I've used it on more systems than I can count at the shop and I have NEVER had it bork a system or screw something up, not ever. But you can't blame the OS for this, the OS is fine, the flaming idiot that started offering hotfixes to those that don't need them is the damned problem.

And I'm sorry but you may THINK that is why Apple is popular but as a retailer I can tell you its not, its popular precisely because they are elitist . Its the same thing that causes Air Jordans to sell for crazy prices or Prada shoes, is those Prada or Air Jordans made THAT much nicer? Nope but as Porsche found out when they tried to have a 911 priced to compete with the Camaro and nearly killed the company the fact that only a subset of people can afford it? Makes it worth having to "Keep up with the Joneses". I mean can you think of ANY other OS that could have actually had a $1000 app called "I am rich" and have it sell any copies? Being in a college town i'm surrounded by the Apple faithful and while they can't tell you jack shit about the hardware they CAN tell you to the penny how much it costs, quite proud of it in fact. This is why Apple abandoning products at such a fast clip isn't bitched about hardly, because having an old Apple just isn't considered hip, its like buying a used Ferrari.

Finally you can't really compare an embedded product with a general purpose OS and that is what you are doing when you compare MSFT and Apple, The entire currently supported Apple catalog of hardware can be counted on 2 hands with fingers left over and frankly friend you really don't have to "sweat the details" when you only su

You still install Windows updates on a new install the old fashioned way?

http://download.wsusoffline.net/ and don't look back: Push the button, come back later. It self-reboots and just sorta gets it done.

Normal Windows Update is good for incrementally keeping a system up-to-date. If a system is far out of date, then you would be better off using WSUS Offline Update, or if you're installing from scratch, make a sliptreamed install disc with all the current updates.

Why is this flamebait? Do you know how many security patches are in the average Windows SP? I'm sorry but anybody who has waited this long and not applied SP1 is indeed an idiot because every script kiddie on the planet uses those patches and SPs to reverse engineer new exploits specifically targeting fools that don't update the thing.

That said just because you need to apply an SP or a shitload of patches doesn't mean you have to do it the stupid way, not when there is WSUS Offline which will let you download and unattended install the service pack AND all the patches AND all the .NET updates AND any MS Office SPs and updates from 2K3-2K10 AND update DirectX AND Silverlight AND Windows media player AND Ineternet explorer, all at once and unattended. Granted if you are doing a clean install of RTM you'll probably have to run it twice of be sure to turn off UAC until you are done as it can't reboot and re-run itself with UAC on but for all the benefits of having everything done automatically while you go have lunch its well worth that tiny bit of effort.

So there really is no excuse as between WSUS and Ninite for all your third party stuff unattended, like flash, hulu, your choice of several browsers and AVs, etc you can take a bare drive and have a fully loaded fully patched Win 7 system in less than an hour and a half with you only being required for maybe 5 clicks all told, everything is taken care of.

So I'm sorry but the parent is right, anybody that doesn't install SP1 is an idiot, they might as well turn off their firewall and take their unpatched IE and start surfing dodgy websites because they are frankly asking for it.

Let's be realistic here with your last comment. Running Windows is frankly asking for it.

Especially when you have to go through all that bullshit just so you can finally answer "Yes" to the person who's been waiting 3 hours to finally get online after you rebuilt their (infected) computer from scratch.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, you better install anti-malware, anti-spyware, and anti-virus too. Oh, and don't forget to patch those too. Yeah, just tell the user to come back in another hour or two. It might be ready by then.

Why is this flamebait? Do you know how many security patches are in the average Windows SP? I'm sorry but anybody who has waited this long and not applied SP1 is indeed an idiot because every script kiddie on the planet uses those patches and SPs to reverse engineer new exploits specifically targeting fools that don't update the thing.

That said just because you need to apply an SP or a shitload of patches doesn't mean you have to do it the stupid way, not when there is WSUS Offline which will let you download and unattended install the service pack AND all the patches AND all the .NET updates AND any MS Office SPs and updates from 2K3-2K10 AND update DirectX AND Silverlight AND Windows media player AND Ineternet explorer, all at once and unattended. Granted if you are doing a clean install of RTM you'll probably have to run it twice of be sure to turn off UAC until you are done as it can't reboot and re-run itself with UAC on but for all the benefits of having everything done automatically while you go have lunch its well worth that tiny bit of effort.

So there really is no excuse as between WSUS and Ninite for all your third party stuff unattended, like flash, hulu, your choice of several browsers and AVs, etc you can take a bare drive and have a fully loaded fully patched Win 7 system in less than an hour and a half with you only being required for maybe 5 clicks all told, everything is taken care of.

So I'm sorry but the parent is right, anybody that doesn't install SP1 is an idiot, they might as well turn off their firewall and take their unpatched IE and start surfing dodgy websites because they are frankly asking for it.

Mentioned it above, but just use http://www.wsusoffline.net/ to roll your own WP2.

In the meantime, there are always tools like http://www.wsusoffline.net/ to roll one's own Service Pack 2 in case a new install becomes necessary (English introduction is below the German one).

The reason autopatcher stagnated is a lot of folks moved over to WSUS Offline because while it doesn't give you the little reg "tweaks' of APUP what it DOES do is give you all the SPs and patches, including MS Office and .NET, and lets you roll them into anything you want, thumbsticks, DVDs, shared drive on the network, and it'll let you cover both server and desktop versions so frankly its a lot friendlier. Since i don't work on servers much anymore mine is set up on a share drive with all the desktop OSes, even Win XP X64 which APUP never really supported well, and I can just point any new install at the share and run it.

BTW it'll install a good 90% of the patches without requiring a reboot, but if you don't want to have to mess with any reboots at all it has command line switches that will let it take care of reboots and finishing up but you have to kill UAC for the duration of the install so it'll have the permissions.

Let old Hairy fix that problem right up...blam! there ya go, no charge. hell I'll even be nice and take care of the third party stuff most folks want...slam!. Just use these two and go make you a sammich while they run, totally unattended, no muss, no fuss, and with WSUS Offline you can even have it apply the updates for MS Office and .NET while its at it. I keep WSUS on a network drive at the shop, it has every SP and update for every version of Windows from XP - Win 7 X64, while I'm installing the OS I just tell WSUS to drop the latest patches and SP along with .NET into a folder labeled for that OS and its ready to run by the time I hear the Windows chime, couldn't be simpler. you can even have it put the updates onto a thumbstick or DVD if you need to do it somewhere where else, easy peasy friend.

There are alternatives: http://www.wsusoffline.net/

Well I agree you can just use a proxy and beat all of the above, but when it comes to drivers...WTF are you doing man? Seriously what the hell? you are using a search engine to find fricking drivers?

Let your friendly neighborhood repairman Hairyfeet help you out there grasshopper, learn how us old greybeards get a system from blank drive to up and running with NO effort in less than an hour and a half, here we go.

1.- Go to Driverpacks and download the packs for any OSes you are gonna be installing, you can even put them all on a thumbdrive or DVD for ease of use.

2.- Go to WSUS Offline and download their update generator. Again simply check the boxes for what you want, they have XP-7, 32 and 64bit, you can even get all the MS Office and .NET patches while you are at it. I personally have every patch from 2K-Win 7 X64 on a shared drive, couldn't be easier to use and the nice thing is you'll never have to waste bandwidth downloading a patch or service pack twice, one time takes care of it

3.- Once you have the machine up and running, after you have run the driverpack and WSUS so you have it all patched and set up nice and neat go to Ninite to take care of most of your third party stuff, your flash and codecs and the like. Again just check the boxes for whatever you want and run it, couldn't be simpler.

4.-The final icing on the delicious cake is to go grab a copy of Comodo Time Machine and when its installed have it make a snapshot and lock it. That will give you your own "roll back to factory state" just like the big OEMs but with all the patches and drivers and third party softare installed. Then set it to make a snapshot daily and if your user bones anything, even if they make it unbootable, they can be back up and running in 15 minutes or less, easy peasy.

Well there you have it, 4 simple little steps that will take you from blank drive to running system hassle free. Your actual interaction time? less than 10 minutes since the majority of its completely automated so you only need to make the selection and go do something while it runs. But don't hunt for drivers on the net, that's just a waste of time and you are just as liable to get a trojan pretending to be a driver as not.

You can still get to a decent patch level (not all the way) just by having the offline installers for SP2 and SP3.

Beyond that, you might be interested in this tool:
http://download.wsusoffline.net/