How can I patch a computer without an Internet connection?

There is often the need to be able to patch a Windows system without an internet connection.  Many reasons such as available download bandwidth and speed mean that we want to be able to patch a computer pretty quickly.  Recently I had this scenario to handle in my own test lab.  I found a cool utility called WSUS Offline Generator to enable me to download and install patches for anything from Windows XP onwards.  This includes Office 2003 onwards too. 

You simply download the utility, place it in a folder and then run it.  Select the Windows versions and Office versions you want and then go for it.  It will download all the patches needed to bring a machine to almost the current levels.

The utility also has a few options to prepare the updates for you.

One of the options allows it to create an ISO for each of the operating systems and one for Office.  Using this you can either burn a DVD or mount an ISO to patch your machine even if they are a virtual machine.

Below you can see the ISO’s that this has created for me today.

One of the other options that it can do is to create a folder on a USB stick (USB Medium option above) and then refresh those.  This is great as now I’ve got a 16GB USB stick with pretty much most everything I need.

Does it miss some patches?  Yes it does – but I took a Vista machine with NO patches, and used the WSUS Offline Generator to patch it.  In the end the only thing it needed was 20 remaining patches – 8 of which were drivers which this utility does not handle.  I’d consider that pretty good for my needs.

Once you’ve run the utility, you can run it subsequent times and it will download just the changed patches.  As you can see in the screen shot at the top of the page, you can also have it refresh the USB Medium that you are using as well.

You can check out this cool utility here on the creators website.