How to troubleshoot WSUS when clients can't download and install patches.
If you're using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) to download, approve, and distribute patches to computers across your network, then occasionally you may find one of your client machines has problems downloading patches from your WSUS server. If this happens, here's how you can troubleshoot: go to the affected machine and open Internet Explorer and manually connect to the Windows Update (or Microsoft Update) website by opening the URL
http://update.microsoft.com on the machine. When you do this, the Update website should provide you with an error code that helps you diagnose the problem that is occuring on your client machine.
About Mitch Tulloch
Mitch Tulloch was lead author for the Windows Vista Resource Kit from Microsoft Press, which is the book for IT pros who want to deploy, maintain and support Windows Vista in mid- and large-sized network environments. Mitch was also the author of Introducing Windows Server 2008 and technical project lead for the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit, both books also from Microsoft Press. For more information on these and other books by Mitch, see www.mtit.com .
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