used x60 came w/ SP3; what do do about 100 windows updates?

[andrea b.]

Thanks to the good advice I'd gotten on this board, I went ahead and bought an X60 (1707) on eBay; it arrived yesterday. Looks like it's a keeper.

The question is - it came with XP SP3; what to do about the dozens of Windows updates - Most of which seem to be relevant to SP2, and some of which - to SP1!

How do I sift through them? Or can I assume that SP3 already includes most of these patches?

Thanks!

Andrea

[craigmontHunter]

If sp3 is installed, I would just let it run through, and not deselect any. If it does not need the update it will not install, but more likely it is not included in SP3 for whatever reason, so just let it go and do what it does. When all of those are installed, there will be more updates, patching the patches. It will take a while.

Good luck

[pkiff]

Yes to what craigmontHunter said.

On my X60Tablet, there were also pages and pages of updates required to XP SP3 Tablet Edition, and it took a while to run through them all, but I didn't bother reviewing them (who has time!) and just installed all critical and recommended updates. Don't forget to also use the Lenovo "System Update" to update your Lenovo-specific Thinkpad drivers as well.

It would be nice if all the Microsoft updates were available in a single file that could be downloaded and installed en masse, but I think that Microsoft sent legal notices to the various helpful people who attempted to make such collected downloads available and forced most of them to take them down. Systems administrators often create and manage such mass collections themselves, but for an individual working on a single computer, it is probably not worth it to create such a collection. Just make a backup of your installation after you finish installing all those annoying updates.

Phil.

[fasteez]

Having recently suffered those 125 updates, on a x31 though, the download time wasn't that long compared to the actual unpack/setup time (again old x31 hdd), I almost regretted to say yes to IE8 which took 25% of the time to cook itself.

[andrea b.]

Thanks all - I just let the system go through its rigamarole and said, 'whatever'. No harm seemed to come of it. (I agree with fasteez about IE8. I hear that some do successfully uninstall it from XP - but I'm afraid to hazard it.)