Vince’s Tech Tips - Freeware Grouping and Installation, WSUS Offline Updater

Vince Meek, one of our professional Network Engineers here at Alliance Technologies, offers some friendly tech tips to help your IT Department and general users alike.

Freeware Grouping and Installation

When building a new machine from scratch, there are a number of freeware programs that might need to be installed– Mozilla Firefox, Open Office, Apple iTunes, Adobe Flash, 7Zip, Gimp, MalwareBytes, and many more – all which must be built into an image or installed separately via the developers’ websites. Finding and installing all these programs separately eats up a lot of time, but there are better ways to do it. Ninite and The Great Unattended Project both provide services to find, group, and install all these freeware programs with just a few clicks – the service they provide is great and completely free. Ninite provides a list of checkboxes on a website and then builds a custom installer for you. TGUP uses an installer first, then allows you to select and install all the programs you want from inside its own program. Both work great.

The Great Unattended Project: http://tgup.net

Ninite: http://ninite.com

WSUS Offline Updater

The WSUS Offline Updater provides an alternative to the Windows Update utility. It allows a user to update windows quickly without an internet connection. More information can be found here: http://download.wsusoffline.net