Hands On: Save Windows Updates for use on a new PC

Secure Windows easily by downloading and saving Updates from Microsoft's website

Exactly four years ago, we showed how it was possible to download and save Windows Updates for use on other PCs, or to avoid having to download all the updates again after reinstalling Windows.

Reader Larry Tomkins, who evidently keeps all his issues of PCW, reminded us of this and wanted to know if it was still possible.

The good news is that it is still possible, although the procedure has changed and is now even more long-winded than before. So this is what you do in XP.

Start All Programs, Windows Update. In the list of options on the left, choose ‘Use administrator options’. In the page this produces, you’ll see a blue link in the first paragraph to the ‘Windows Update Catalog’. Click on this and, if you haven’t done this before, you’ll be presented with a few hoops to jump through.

First, you’ll get a warning at the top of the screen stating that ‘This website wants to install...Microsoft Update Catalog…’ Click on this, then choose ‘Install Activex control’ from the pop-up menu.

This will produce a dialogue with an install button. If the latter is greyed out, then click the ‘More Options’ button and select either ‘Always install…’ or ‘Ask every time…’. Then click the Install button.

When the installation completes, a new IE window will appear showing the Microsoft Update Catalog. This is less helpful than it was four years ago as, instead of classified lists, you get a search field.

Putting ‘Windows XP’ in here, for example, returns over 1,000 results. As before, you can download updates for any supported version of Windows.

Having got the search results, you can browse through them, clicking the ‘Add’ button for each item you want to download. When you’ve made your selection, click ‘View Basket’ at the top of the screen, and when the basket contents appear, click ‘Download’.

Yet another window will open asking you to select a folder to download to. Click the Browse button, select a folder, then Continue. You may be presented with a licence agreement at this stage, after which the files will commence their download. We hope.

Screen escapes capture
Now here’s a strange thing. Reader Roger Castle-Smith has been corresponding with this column since the days of Windows 95, so he knows his way around it.

He was using Windows Media Player to play a .wmv file, and wanted to take a screenshot. So he paused the video, pressed Alt and Print Screen to capture the Media Player window and pasted this into a Word document. All seemed OK until he came to print the document. The captured Media Player window had no content.

You can try this for yourself, pasting screenshots into any application that will display bitmaps, and you will notice other strange effects. The framing may be different in the screenshot and, even more bizarrely, if you make a second capture and paste it, the first capture changes to the second. If you then close Media Player, both captures will lose their contents. So, what’s happening?

With video, all the usual rules of display disappear. The contents you see when playing video in Media Player are overlaid, rather than being contained within the WMP window. When you paste a screenshot, the overlay ‘punches a hole’ in the host application. If you move the latter’s window around you’ll see different parts of the frame. So, if you want to make screen captures you won’t do it this way.

There are several workarounds, including third-party software, but the simplest method is to go to Tools, Options, Performance.

Click on the ‘Advanced’ button and this will produce the Video Acceleration Settings dialogue. In the Video Acceleration section, clear the ‘Use overlays’ box.

This will let you make screen captures in the normal way. It will also reduce performance and playback quality, so don’t forget to turn it back on after taking your shots.

Note that the equivalent setting for DVD video doesn’t appear to work, but we were able to grab screens from both .wmv and .avi files.

Precision targeting
In a previous column we looked at a way of creating your own folder of Control Panel ‘favourites’ in the Windows XP Start menu.

Here we’ll refine that with a trick that lets you jump straight to a specific tab of a Control Panel item. You can’t do this by dragging and dropping so first open the Start menu. Navigate to (or create) the ‘My Controls’ folder and create a new shortcut.

Let’s say you want to go straight to the Advanced tab in System Properties. The System Properties component file in XP Control Panel is Sysdm.cpl. It has seven tabs, and the Advanced tab is the third from the left counting the home tab ­ General ­ as 0. A shortcut to control.exe sysdm.cpl,@0,3 will open System Properties with the Advanced tab already selected.

Not all Control Panel items behave in this way ­ some, such as Network Setup or Add Hardware launch a wizard. Others, such as Administrative Tools or Fonts, open another folder, and others still, such as Add and Remove programs and User Accounts, have a different interface for switching between sections.

Of those that do, consistency should not be expected. Whereas System Properties behaves impeccably with @0,0 opening the General tab through to @0,6 opening the Remote tab, other applets don’t. The Regional and Language tabs appear to be numbered from @0,1 to @0,3, and Display settings goes from @0,0 opening the Desktop round to @0,5 opening the usual default tab, Themes.

Power Options doesn’t appear to respond to any switch, and the waters may be further muddied by device drivers and other software that add their own tabs. The attached table shows some common Control Panel items with their CPL filenames and number of tabs.

Feel free to jump in and experiment. Note that your shortcuts will have a default icon ­ you can improve on this by changing the shortcut icon to one in the corresponding CPL file, or any other icon that takes your fancy.

Cake and eat it
Although Windows Desktop Search is a great improvement on the XP Search Companion for finding files with certain content, it’s not the best tool for finding files by name ­ especially in non-indexed locations.

If you’re trying to hunt out an executable file or DLL, for example, you are far better off with the Search Companion.

One annoyance here is that if you’ve installed Desktop Search, then the Search commands on the Start Menu, and the Windows Explorer toolbar will now launch Desktop Search instead of Search Companion.

To get to the latter you need to scroll down the left pane and ‘Click here to use Search companion’. It doesn’t seem possible to create separate shortcuts for the two searches. There are, however, some workarounds.

The first involves a Registry edit. Having made a System Restore point, go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \CLSID \{FFAC7A18-EDF9-40DE-BA3F-49FC2269855E} \TreatAs. Export this key as a .reg file (this will give you an ‘undo’ merge file) then delete the TreatAs key.

This will restore the old behaviour of the Start menu and Explorer toolbar items, but you’ll still have the functionality of the Desktop Search from the Taskbar toolbar. However, there is a sacrifice ­ you lose the specific Desktop Search Explorer bar.

Windows Desktop Search is not the only option. Copernic compares favourably with WDS. It has a faster preview, searches non-Microsoft mail, and seems less prone to bugs. So, what we’ve done is to ditch WDS, revert to the Search Companion for searching for files, and use Copernic for searching in files. You’ll find it on Copernic's site.