Simplix UpdatePack 7 / 2008 R2

Even though Windows 7 is set to reach its end of life in January 2020, it still has an impressive number of users, and many of them are not planning on upgrading to Windows 10 any time soon. Microsoft will discontinue support for the popular OS and Windows Server 2008 R2 on the same day – January 14, 2020.

While feature updates have not been released for a long time, the OS is still receiving security updates regularly. However, when performing a fresh Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 installation, applying all these updates can be a torturous process.

An Update Rollup was made available by Microsoft in May 2016, which contains all patches from the release of Windows 7 SP1 to April 2016, and security updates became cumulative from October 2016 onward. While this helps reduce the number of files you need to download, there are still quite a few of them to deal with.

Simplix UpdatePack 7 / 2008 R2 was designed to bring them all together and provide you with a single installer for all the security updates Microsoft has released so far. What’s more, it can be used to integrate the updates into Windows 7 SP1 or Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 distributions.

When run from an elevated Command Prompt, the following parameters can be used to change the installer’s behavior:

- /Reboot - to reboot your system automatically, if required. - /S - for a silent installation. - /Silent - for a passive installation. You can check its progress, but it is fully automatic. - /IE11 - to install Internet Explorer 11 and its localization. - /Temp - to specify the location of the temporary folder. - /NoSpace - to skip checking for free space on the system partition. - /NoUSB - to disable integration of USB 3.0 and 3.1 into the distribution package. - /NVMe - to integrate NVMe support. - /FixOn - enable or disable Spectre and Meltdown protection. By default, it is disabled for Windows 7 and enabled for Windows Server 2008 R2.

To integrate the updates into a Windows distribution, you can use the following parameters: - /WimFile - to set the location of the WIM file (absolute path). - /Index= - to indicate the system index in the WIM file. Integration needs to be performed for each index. - /Index=* - for sequential integration of updates into all of the WIM file’s indexes. - /Optimize - to optimize the size of the WIM file after updates have been integrated. - /Optimize=esd - to convert the VIM file to EST after integrating updates.