5 replies to this topic

[Mike Rochip]

While trying to fix a problem with Help and Support, I thought the problem might reside with IE7 Beta. I ran a utility that was supposed to fix IE and ironically it fixed Help and Suppor and killed IE. When I try to open iE, the window appears briefly, closes, and iexplorer drops off of the Task Manager list.

While reseaching this I came across posts that said IE is not required for Automatic Updates if you set Automatic Updates to Automatic.

I have AU set to notify me when new updates are available, but not to download or install them. After receiving the update notification, I can click on the tray icon, review and choose which updates to install, and complete the process. AU functions in its own window without using IE at all.

So far it is working perfectly and so is Help and Support.

[krit86lr]

You don't need IE for anything anymore. MS doesn't require it anymore, and I use my FF IE Tab for online scanners. Let me rephrase that: IE is needed for very little these days.

If I were you though, I would want to find out why IE broke because it wasn't done intentionally.

[Andavari]

Offtopic but somewhat relevant:
The biggest gripe I have with Automatic Updates is that I've noticed it downloads slower than just using the Microsoft Update site itself. It's almost as if Automatic Updates is trickling the download whereas Microsoft Update uses the full bandwidth. For instance the April critical updates took 50 minutes to download, which was approximately 9 MB, that would have only taken 25-30 minutes had I just used Microsoft Update.

[DjLizard]

It does trickle the download. It uses idle network bandwidth. That's what BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) is designed to do.

[Andavari]

Thanks for the clarification DJLizard!
It looks like I'll set it to only notify me of future updates, and instead download via Microsoft Update.

[res45]

If you dont want to mess with windows updates and know what you need to download go to this site it has all of the updates. http://www.softwarep...dows/index.html