Deploying Windows Updates?

WinBreak asks: "Well, I guess I'd be an 'IT Administrator' - but I work for a public library. The job consists of baby sitting 20-odd computers. The problem is, as a public library, we don't have much bandwidth - a simple 768K DSL line shared among everyone. It's good enough, for our normal traffic, and when people want to come in and do research (as long as there aren't too many kids on YouTube!). The problem comes when we need to do reformats and installs on machines. Most of our CD's for these machines are XP with Service Pack 1 - though we have a couple with Service Pack 2. For the SP1 CD's, we immediately deploy the SP2 Redistributable. But that still leaves OVER 100MB worth of downloads from Windows Update to go get. Our budget isn't great in the IT department, so spending money is not a great option - but I could sling together a grant proposal if need be. So how do others manage deploying a new install of Windows? Are we really expected to still download 100+MB per reinstall? Is Service Pack 3 on the horizon?" "I've heard of programs that download updates to a server computer and distribute them through the network to clients, but that only worked for files released on Microsoft's Knowledge Base, if I recall correctly - not for all Windows Updates."

Comments

If all most of them are doing is surfing the net .

[tomhudson]

(since someone has to say it ...)

If most of those computers are "pubic access" to surf the net and check webmail, just dump Windows for any one of the major linux distros. Cheaper, easier to maintain, less prone to malware. SuSE also lets you create local repositories for updates, so you can just download them once and roll them out.