none wrote:
Got an Averatec 3150P laptop still running XP Pro after 15 years, maybe
because I only drag it out nowadays on or maybe shortly after Patch
Tuesday to see if it still boots up and can snag whatever updates are
available. I was doing this via the registry hack that spoofed XP
Imbedded and POSReady 2009 (the one that promised updates until next
year). This worked fine until some event-don't recall exactly what
now-prompted Microsoft to temporarily resume updating XP a little while
back. Last updates I successfully got were at the end of March (little
late updating that month and have slacked off since). Anyway, we're
back to the eternal "searching for updates" issue and Microsoft Security
Essentials, which HAD started working again, now won't update even after
searching overnight. Any ideas as to where I should go from here? Really
would like to get those last few months of updates that hack promised.
I'm not set up for that particular combo (WinXP + WePOS),
but the Wsusoffline people had an approach for this.
For example, if updating Vista, they had a list of updates
that must be done first, to prevent Vista from "spinning".
This was the "wupre" list in their installer. Unfortunately,
the list was never developed for WinXP (52?). W60 or Vista
was the oldest supported. So I can't dig into the 9.2.4 legacy
version and pull that rabbit out of a hat.
http://download.wsusoffline.net/
ESR version
23.03.2018 Version 9.2.4
This is the kind of file you'd consult, but there
isn't one for WinXP.
wsusoffline\client\static\
StaticUpdateIds-wupre-w60.txt
*******
It's known that there are perhaps five things that drive
supersedence nuts on WinXP.
Kernel patches
GDI patches
ATM (adobe type manager) font rendering patches
Internet Explorer Cumulative Updates
(To a lesser extent, maybe Killbits)
MSRT monthly AV scanner, scans for top 50 pests
Each of these patch trees is deep, and the latest patch
supersedes a hundred patches before it. WU goes "exponential"
trying to work all of that out.
For example, all it would take is a freshly released
IE Cumulative to make WU spin in circles again.
As an example here, I can see that WePOS got an IE8 patch in
May2018. You'll notice the size is a fraction of the Windows 7
one, which is weird. Cumulative updates to Internet Explorer
usually involve a complete IE installer, which just installs
a fresh copy. That's what the ~50MB file would normally be doing.
https://s33.postimg.cc/6p2xtt9wf/catalog_server.gif
In terms of "spinning in circles" time saved, installing
the latest IE Cumulative, reduces the time to wait for the
Update List to appear by about 40%. There's still a significant
delay caused by the others. The first three items in the list,
cause madness.
The official download page for MSRT doesn't include WinXP coverage.
And the catalog server doesn't have "malicious software removal tool"
for Windows XP.
In any case, to stop the spinning, that's the basic theme.
*******
There is a scanner for making an update list. This does the
same thing as Windows Update, only with less spinning. If
this gave a list of 70 updates to do, about 68 of the updates
you'd *manually* download would install, and 2 updates would
refuse to install. That's because whatever method is used
here, isn't quite as thorough as the built-in WU method.
But this tool can also hint at things to install to stop
the spinning.
The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) 2.3 is available he
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/down...s.aspx?id=7558
This shows a picture of the MBSA dialog window, where you set
some tick boxes. First it downloads the wsusscn2.cab file
(200MB), then it works out updates. It only downloads
fresh copies of that file once a day, so if you do two runs
of MBSA in quick succession, the second run doesn't do a download.
The update numbers may help you identify which prerequisite
updates you need to stop the spinning.
http://s12.postimg.cc/4df2ka8bh/mbsa.gif
I've not tried that with the WePOS hack, and I don't
recollect seeing WePOS associated with MBSA. But, it's
something else you can try.
Vista is such a ******* at this stuff, that it took
me three tries in VM setups, with a cost of two solid
days of work each, before I could get a Vista update
window to appear. WinXP isn't quite as bad as Vista,
and if you wait long enough, that WU window will
appear. For the Vista case, it was the list of updates
to install in the "StaticUpdateIds-wupre-w60.txt" that
fixed the thing. So for Vista users, you do have a
chance to stop the spinning. But for WinXP, all we've
got is some "principles of operation" to work with,
to regain control.
I've wasted days and days on this stuff. I've worked
on WinXP and Vista multiple times. I've done Win7 and
Win8.1 runs. Windows 10 goes nuts, only once in a
blue moon, and resetting WU sometimes helps there.
Win7 and Win8.1 now use Cumulative Updates, and for
the most part, the spinning there is stopped (there is
work to do on a fresh install though). If you do a
fresh install of Vista today, you'd better have that
wupre file handy. For WinXP/WePOS, well, you're on your
own so to speak.
Good luck,
Paul