Yesterday I babysat a Windows 2008 R2 server for three hours applying multiple rounds of Windows Updates. This is not a good use of my time.
This is a server that cannot apply updates automatically; I have to schedule maintenance windows in order to reboot the server. I want to bring Windows completely up to date during that maintenance window, which often means multiple rounds of a check-for-updates/download-updates/apply-updates/reboot cycle.
I know that I can download updates and apply them manually, but that doesn't really help when Windows determines after the first round of updates that it needs to apply even more updates.
The biggest problem is that it can easily take ten minutes for Windows to determine what updates it needs to apply. It can then take easily another ten minutes to download these updates. Then it can take ten minutes to reboot and finish the update installation. If it decides that you need three rounds of updates, that's an hour and a half, and that assumes that Windows doesn't freak out and make one of those steps take forever, or fail, making you start over.
Is there any way to determine all of the updates that would be needed to bring a Windows system up to date beforehand, so that I can just apply them all by hand and avoid having to wait for Windows to perform its interminably long checks and ridiculously slow downloads multiple times during my maintenance window.
(I feel like this should be a FAQ, but I can't find it.)