Method 1:
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The standard Microsoft way of saving your updates would be:
* Visit the Windows Update Web site: *windowsupdate.microsoft.com
* Click Personalize Windows Update.
* Select the Display the link to the Windows Update Catalog under See Also check box.
* Click Save Settings.
* A Windows Update Catalog link appears under See Also.
* Click the Windows Update Catalog link.
* Click Find updates for Microsoft Windows operating systems.
* Click the appropriate product, and then click Search.
* Click Critical Updates and Service Packs.
* Locate the patch you want, and then click Add.
* Click Go to download basket. In the Type or browse to the download location of your choice box, type the full path for the folder in which you want to save the patch. Or, click Browse to browse to the folder. Click Download Now.
Method 2:
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Another method to save the patch locally is to install the update 'as usual' from the Windows Updates page. Once the copy process is complete and the Install process is about to begin, look for the
WUTemp folder in C:\ (or whatever drive you've installed Windows). This is the destination folder used by Windows Updates to save the hotfix. The hotfix will be deleted automatically once installed. Therefore, copy the WUTEMP directory contents to a new folder, while the install process has just started.
Method 3:
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After the updates have all been downloaded, you can check your Temporary Internet Files folder (cache). Arrange by Internet Address, and you can easily make out your update files. Copy them and paste it to some folder/drive of your choice.
Method 4:
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This method totally bypasses downloading via Windows Update (browser)
- hence you can download the files using your favourite download manager. Generally, all download managers are configured to ignore downloads from the Microsoft site, which is why they dont automatically catch the links. Generally, that option to ignore the MS site is under Monitoring/Ignore settings or something like that (just browse through your download manager's options). After deleting the Microsoft entry, close your browser(if open) and restart your download manager. Now when you go to the windows update site and try to download the updates, your download manager should pick it up.
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Method 4b:
In case your download manager doesn't catch the links, then you'll need to manually add the links. To extract the links from your browser, you'll need a proxy server program. You can use Naviscope or HTTP Interceptor to intercept/look at your HTTP Requests headers. For eg, your HTTP Request header for loading a gif from some site might look like this:
Code:
GET *vbwire.com/images/VBWire-ani.gif HTTP/1.1
Host: vbwire.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Accept: image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: *www.siliconwold.com/interceptor/interceptor_home.htm
In this case, you can easily get the url of the gif by looking at the first line. (*vbwire.com/images/VBWire-ani.gif). Similarly, you can look at the headers while downloading from the microsoft site, and get the urls, copy paste them into your download manager, and download them.
Method 5:
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There is a program called as WUtooL that allows you to save the updates that are downloaded to a specified folder. If you keep WUtooL while visiting windowsupdate.com, it will automatically save a copy of the files that you download, so they can be used again.
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Generally, I always prefer using Method 4, since I can download using my download manager, and hence I can pause, resume, download later, etc, so I have more flexibility and control over the Update downloads. But if you prefer downloading using IE, then Method 5 would be most suitable for you. If you have missed some earlier updates/downloads, then you can use Method 1, the Microsoft Method.
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