Free help for Microsoft patch management

Free help for Microsoft patch management



This tip was submitted to the SearchSecurity Tip Exchange Contest by user Leonard Bronsky. Let other users know how useful it is by rating the tip below.

Those of you who have heard about the free utility HFNETCHK from Microsoft for the detection of security vulnerabilities, would probably be happy to here that there's more to it. Gravity Storm Software released an absolutely free LITE version of its flagship product Service Pack Manager 2000. Since it is based on a full version of the product, it offers a full-blown UI and a set of features that are unmatched by any other free product.

A friend of mine that works for a big insurance company got it a week ago (by my recommendation) to manage 2000+ machines. He still can't believe it is free, but since he needs actually to patch the machines he is going to buy the full version.

At any rate, this is a greatest ROI tool I have ever seen. The company has a free spreadsheet on its

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Web site that anybody can use to see how much it would cost to keep your network manually patched. Well, with all the respect, I do not think there's one sane administrator out there that can manually patch a network of even 10 machines alone -- it's simply not viable. So, go a grab that free staff!


This was first published in May 2002

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