AutoPatcherI always dread the question each time I go to my parents’ place. “Can you do the updates on our computer?”. Being a good son, I say “Yes” and then immediately regret my promise.

You see, the problem is that my parents live in the country and all they have is dial-up for Internet connectivity. Pulling down 300 MB of updates over a noisy 56k line with people picking up the receiver every few minutes and asking, “Are you done on the Internet yet?” can get pretty frustrating.

So you can imagine my excitement when I discovered AutoPatcher. Just what does AutoPatcher do for me? Well, here is what the website says:

AutoPatcher is based on the functionality of these special updates, automating their installation process. This way, with only a few mouse clicks and two minutes of your time, AutoPatcher is able to continue with the installation of the items you selected. In short, AutoPatcher combines the advantage of both Windows Update (presentation and description of updates and automated installation), and the special administrative updates (portability and installation without the need of an Internet connection).

That’s right! I can download AutoPatcher back home with my high speed Internet connection and then just run the disk on my parents, computer without taxing their Internet connection (and my patience).

AutoPatcher comes in the following versions:

There is also an Office version in the works but it still needs to be completed.

There are also three different package types, as well, which let’s you download just what you need. The package types are:

  • The Full release, which comes with everything (updates, add-ons, tweaks).
  • The Lite release, which lacks heavy add-ons (such as ’sunjava’).
  • The Update release, which is installed over last month’s Full or Lite.

The only downside (which isn’t really a downside if you know your computer stuff) is that the disks are only distributed via bittorrent. You can download the files as a self-extracting executable or as a bittorrent. (Thanks for the update, Penguin Geek.) If you are not familiar with bittorrent, you can get up to speed. If you are looking for a bittorrent client, I would suggest μTorrent.

There are other users for AutoPatcher other than parents’ computers with slow Internet connections. It is really useful in a corporate environment where you need to update remote systems on a regular basis. You can create the disks and send them out to the remote systems for updating or you can extract the contents of the AutoPatcher files and share them on the network for remote updates, especially if you aren’t interested in installing Windows Server Update Services.

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Tim Fehlman