Hands On: Save Windows Updates for use on a new PC

Exactly four years ago, we showed how it was possible to download and save Windows Updates for use on other PCs, or to avoid having to download all the updates again after reinstalling Windows.

Reader Larry Tomkins, who evidently keeps all his issues of PCW, reminded us of this and wanted to know if it was still possible.

The good news is that it is still possible, although the procedure has changed and is now even more long-winded than before. So this is what you do in XP.

Start All Programs, Windows Update. In the list of options on the left, choose ‘Use administrator options’. In the page this produces, you’ll see a blue link in the first paragraph to the ‘Windows Update Catalog’. Click on this and, if you haven’t done this before, you’ll be presented with a few hoops to jump through.

First, you’ll get a warning at the top of the screen stating that ‘This website wants to install...Microsoft Update Catalog…’ Click on this, then choose ‘Install Activex control’ from the pop-up menu.

This will produce a dialogue with an install button. If the latter is greyed out, then click the ‘More Options’ button and select either ‘Always install…’ or ‘Ask every time…’. Then click the Install button.

When the installation completes, a new IE window will appear showing the Microsoft Update Catalog. This is less helpful than it was four years ago as, instead of classified lists, you get a search field.

Putting ‘Windows XP’ in here, for example, returns over 1,000 results. As before, you can download updates for any supported version of Windows.

Having got the search results, you can browse through them, clicking the ‘Add’ button for each item you want to download. When you’ve made your selection, click ‘View Basket’ at the top of the screen, and when the basket contents appear, click ‘Download’.

Yet another window will open asking you to select a folder to download to. Click the Browse button, select a folder, then Continue. You may be presented with a licence agreement at this stage, after which the files will commence their download. We hope.

Screen escapes capture
Now here’s a strange thing. Reader Roger Castle-Smith has been corresponding with this column since the days of Windows 95, so he knows his way around it.

He was using Windows Media Player to play a .wmv file, and wanted to take a screenshot. So he paused the video, pressed Alt and Print Screen to capture the Media Player window and pasted this into a Word document. All seemed OK until he came to print the document. The captured Media Player window had no content.

You can try this for yourself, pasting screenshots into any application that will display bitmaps, and you will notice other strange effects. The framing may be different in the screenshot and, even more bizarrely, if you make a second capture and paste it, the first capture changes to the second. If you then close Media Player, both captures will lose their contents. So, what’s happening?

With video, all the usual rules of display disappear. The contents you see when playing video in Media Player are overlaid, rather than being contained within the WMP window. When you paste a screenshot, the overlay ‘punches a hole’ in the host application. If you move the latter’s window around you’ll see different parts of the frame. So, if you want to make screen captures you won’t do it this way.