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I have about 4000 old machines scattered around 100 offices in different states. These machines are running Windows 2000 Professional (SP1) with IE 5.0 (SP1). I would like to upgrade these machines to SP4 of the OS and IE 6.0 with Silverlight.

Are there any remote administration tools that enables me to "push" these upgrades and any custom scripts I created to the 4000 client machines?

Windows Update is set to "Never check for updates". I am open to other suggestions/ideas on how to accomplish this as long as it does not invlove visiting the 100 offices.

Thank you

del.ave
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    Why you don't want to use Windows Update? – lg. Jul 28 '10 at 13:52
  • - Is it possible to change Windows Update settings on remote machines without having to RDP into each machine? – del.ave Jul 28 '10 at 14:10
  • @del.ave - Are you using AD with these machines? – GregD Jul 28 '10 at 14:13
  • They are on AD, but I didn't want to get all available updates. If change the policy to "automatically check & download" then it will grab everything. – del.ave Jul 28 '10 at 15:23
  • WSUS is free and highly recommended in your situation and worth the time to set up and configure. It gives you very granular control over updates, but only the ones available from Microsoft for MS products. – GregD Jul 28 '10 at 15:32
  • Zounds! If you have that big of an infrastructure and aren't familiar with how to accomplish what you're looking for with Active Directory Group Policy then you really, really need to spend a few dollars and sit down for a day with a qualified Active Directory consultant. You'll learn a lot about ways you can automate your day-to-day operations, save large quantities of time, and get consistency in your client computer configurations. – Evan Anderson Jul 28 '10 at 20:26
  • Thanks for the advice Evan. I admit that I'm not a AD expert nor I'm in the "IT" field. – del.ave Jul 29 '10 at 13:54

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I can almost guarantee that out of 4000 machines, you'll have to visit a few offices even with the best tools pushing updates ;)

GregD
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  • Thanks for the reply. RDP would mean that I have to do the update one machine at a time which is something I'm trying to avoid. Configuration Manager and WSUS - Good tools, but I think they need Windows 2000 SP4 (I have SP1) on the client machines. I'll give them a test though. You are right about having to visit some offices, I'm trying to minimize that as much as possible. – del.ave Jul 28 '10 at 14:06
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I used this yeares ago but haven't touched it since WSUS:

http://www.shavlik.com/sol-patch-management.aspx

joeqwerty
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