In October of 2003 I was working in a small Law Firm as their IT support. One of the things I had to do was update many, many computers and using Windows Update was taking forever! I came up with a batch “auto-patcher” to help speed things up, and since I was a member of Neowin, I thought I’d share. Add in the VB coding talents of Antonis Kaladis, and the AutoPatcher was born. I worked day and night with releases for 2 years before I needed a break. Antonis got a bunch more helpers to help with releases and AutoPatcher thrived. Cut to yesterday…
Microsoft Ceases AutoPatcher Project
I had a call from Microsoft Legal this morning and they have told me that we are no longer allowed to endorse AutoPatcher on Neowin.
Microsoft will only allow updates to be downloaded from its own servers.
Read more here: Goodbye AP!
I can’t figure out why Microsoft would wait 4 years to shut down the project… if they didn’t like it, they could have said so 3.5 years ago (and yes, they were aware of it). Oh well… who am I to question the all-knowing powers that be over in Redmond? 
Anyway, I just wanted to share my thoughts on the subject. Feel free to comment, either here, on Neowin, or on AutoPatcher.com.
R.I.P. AutoPatcher
