UL sources and other noob questions

[brapklak]

Just found WUD and am trying to get my arms around it. Where do the ULs come from? Obviously, someone is putting a lot of work into creating the lists. Is the raw material something Microsoft provides, or are folks reading the update lists from their own personal systems, or what? I am hoping to find a canonical source rather than assuming that another person's PC is the gold standard. Looking towards end-of-life for XP, I'd like to create an archive of all the updates so I can re-install when disks die and are replaced, after MS drops support.

Installation order worries me. I see that others have written batch scripts to read directories and apply whatever updates are found, but surely the order in which they are applied matters? Or is file name, with KB number foremost, close enough to the chronological order to work? Or do folks just run the scripts over and over until there are no updates skipped?

Thanks in advance for any enlightenment.

[tomasz86]

1. Updates are listed on the following websites:

2K - <url temporarily removed, pending update to new one>

XP - http://mimo.zxq.net/updatelist.htm

2K3 - http://www.vorck.com/windows/hotfixes_2003.html

2. The order normally doesn't matter but of course you need to apply big packages like IE, WMP, etc. first and then install updates for them.

3. The KB number doesn't necessarily follow the build time stamp.