Non IE Windows Updates

Now although I'm a Mac-man through and through - I've also done my fair share of building and fixing Windows machines. In the past this has been work-related, but more recently it has dropped down to troubleshooting for family and friends only. As much as I try to convert them to the wisdom of Apple... they just refuse to take the plunge.

When recently helping someone reset their laptop so that they could sell it I came accross a rather annoying catch-22 situation. The laptop had all the recovery software on the hard disk and so a few clicks of the mouse reset it to the out-of-the-factory settings. Unfortunately, out of the factory was December 2004 and so Windows XP Home edition was missing a few service packs and a hell of a lot of security and bug fixes.

No problem - I updated all the AV software and the pre-installed Norton Firewall and then went online to Windows updates and started the long iterative process of applying the updates. After the second machine reboot however, MS Internet Explorer could find no connection to the internet, yet running command prompt and pinging Google by IP and name worked fine. Strange. So I used my computer to download Firefox and using a handy USB stick copied it across and installed it.

Firefox could browse the internet. Explorer couldn't. Assuming that a bug fix from Windows Update had gone wrong I thought to carry on with the update using Firefox... only to be kindly told by Microsoft that ONLY explorer could be used to retrieve updates!!!

Now I was well and truely stuck. The machine crashed when I tried to turn on automatic updates, and no Microsoft-related product could see the internet connection. The only thing that could, wasn't allowed to help. Bugger.

After many hours of googling I found this amazing site that appears to pre-download Microsoft updates and then lets you install them without IE. Genius! After running the update checker in Firefox from this site it found 10 or so critical updates and installed them. Whatever it installed obviously worked as the next time I rebooted the laptop everything was working fine and I was now able to carry on the Windows updating process using Explorer.

The only thing that I found was a problem with the site was that they couldn't install major service packs... but did provide links to direct download from within their FAQ pages.