Goodbye Microsoft Part 2

I decided to make an XP installation disk for archival purposes that contained all current updates. I didn’t want to need the disk for some important purpose in the future only to find out it is unusable. It turns out, this is quite difficult to do. Microsoft doesn’t offer a way to keep up with the 300+ updates to XP since the release of Service Pack 3. 

Fortunately, there are a few useful freeware utilities that are helpful. One of these is WinUpdatesList. “WinUpdatesList displays the list of all Windows updates (Service Packs and Hotfixes) installed on your local computer. For hotfix updates, this utility also displays the list of files updated with these hotfixes.”

Another is Windows Updates Downloader, that does what the name implies, downloads updates from Microsoft. The website also provides pre-made lists to load into WUD.

With these two utilities it is possible to catalog what is currently installed on your computer and download the same files for use in an installation disk image.

After spending quite a while sorting through various files trying to figure out exactly what I needed, I realized there were updates installed on my computer that were obsolete or incorrect versions. Rather than try to sort out the 300 updates, I decided to go another route and use UDC. UDC is a batch program that downloads only critical updates and hotfixes. This is probably a better option if the image will ultimately be used on a different machine in the future.

I also wanted to include all the third party drivers currently installed, to prevent the necessity of manually installing them all later. To extract the inf files I used Driver Backup!.

Once all the files were downloaded, I used a great little program called nLite to create the disk image. nLite has options to include not only the OS updates, but also add-ons such as Acrobar Reader as well as any drivers you want to include. The drivers must be in .inf format, not executables.

The only issue I ran into was that nLite allows you to exclude some Windows components in the installation that you might not want, such as Microsoft Messenger. But it doesn’t modify the installation script, so during installation you are prompted for the missing files. There may be a way to manually fix this in nLite, but I didn’t look into it.

Once the nLite program is done you end up with a custom iso image that you can use to burn to a CD (Be sure to burn the image not the file), or use directly to make a virtual machine. I used VMware simply because it is what I’m used to from working with it on my day job.

That’s it. If in the future you need to run XP, you have a means to do so. I suspect that Microsoft won’t be very accommodating at all in reference to backing up XP installations in April 2014 when extended support for XP ends.

Links

Microsoft Search 
http://search.microsoft.com/en-us/search.aspx 

WinUpdatesList
http://nirsoft.net/utils/wul.html 

Windows Updates Downloader 
http://www.windowsupdatesdownloader.com/Default.aspx 

Updates Downloader, Checker and Add-on Creator 
http://xdot.tk/updates.html 

Drivers Backup! 
http://www.driver-backup.com/ 

XP Service Pack 3 executable 
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/3/7/5374ce96-3838-4959-92af-77ab011fd704/WindowsXP-KB932823-v3-x86-ENU.exe 

XP Service Pack 3 .iso; 
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=25129

The "Cloud" - One More Step To Conformity

Cloud computing is all the rage nowadays. Despite the fact that it is functionally similar to the Mainframe/Workstation architecture, Cloud Computing is being sold as a great advance into the future.
It has a few positives, which I won't go into here, because they aren't really compelling. The more important issue is this;

People don't want to be burdened by taking responsibility for their information. They want someone else to do it for them; store their data, manage it, back it up, safeguard it, and make it available. It isn't progress, it's simply a reflection of the cultural death of personal responsibility.

Capitulating responsibility for information comes at a price, and that price is loss of control over that information. Loss of privacy, and ultimately loss of individuality and self worth. One is further reduced to a quantum of production and consumption. It is ironic that in an age of "diversity and individualism", we are being willingly conformed into identical consuming automatons. Those that truly are individualistic are castigated.

A true advancement would be to make it easier for individuals to manage their responsibilities, rather than slyly convincing them to give them up in the quest for all-encompassing consumerism.