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Uncle bill has struck again, the useful tool, Autopatcher has removed it's downloads from it's server after receiving a nasty gram from M$.

But what could Microsoft do? Was Autopatcher breaking any laws or infringing on copyrights?

Even though what AutoPatcher was NOT illegal M$ has the money to litigate them into bankruptcy defending themselves. which is a tactic M$ and other large companies frequently employ.

On what basis could Microsoft sue?

They would CLAIM that Autopatcher is infringing on thier rights and it would be up to autopatcher to prove they were not. an expensive proposition.

So what if you download the software from another site? Can it still obtain updates?

Microsoft has a product for this purpose, called Windows Server Update Services; however, it uses SQL Server, which I'm skeptical about running on our server at work since that's also a domain controller.

That just sucks in my opinion.

Shame on you MS.

Regards Howard

What is known for now is that Autopatcher has removed the downloads from their site. the AP team is looking into M$ beef with them is since they have been up and running for four years now. here is the posibility of them adding a script to Autopatcher that would download the updates from MS and add them to AutoPatcher if that is acceptable to M$. AutoPatcher has been a lifesaver for people on dialup they could download Autopatcher from a computer with high speed internet and then take the program to update their computer if they had to do a reinstall. face it, SP2 came out 3 freakin years ago and a fresh reinstall and having to download the updates POST SP2 is a nightmare for folks stuck on dial up.

Antonis Kaladis has announced that the AutoPatcher team will continue it's work on autoPatcher by redesigning it and recoding it. Apparently the new version will not include the updates themselves as part of the package. ( satisfying M$) and hope to have the new version of AutoPtcher out by October.

You can still get the current version as a torrent file from softpedia.com,

Does it function properly?

That is not known--unless someone else has tried it?