A lit­tle birdy told me that using WSUS means you don’t need to have acti­vated (i.e. legit) ver­sions of Win­dows or other Microsoft prod­ucts. I’ve had instances where, on rein­stalling Win­dows XP (slip­streamed SP2), over-the-net acti­va­tion wouldn’t work at all and I didn’t get a chance to phone acti­vate for about three weeks. Wasn’t a huge prob­lem because of course IE wasn’t the default browser and I refuse to let peo­ple install MSN Mes­sen­ger (if they’re using Win­dows, they have to use the no-frills, rel­a­tively secure and quick Win­dows Mes­sen­ger!), and there was anti-virus stuff installed, but that’s a while to be run­ning unpatched Windows.

In a small bus envi­ron­ment, WSUS means you can avoid poten­tial headaches like that. In a para­noid reluctant-MS-user envi­ron­ment, it means you can (ille­gally) crack your (legally pur­chased) oper­at­ing sys­tem, and enjoy updates with­out hav­ing to hand out your details on a plat­ter. Or, alter­na­tively, if you’re a com­pre­hen­sive Microsoft pirate from the server to the desk­top, you can take fur­ther advan­tage of their hos­pi­tal­ity by enjoy­ing the fine update ser­vices they have to offer. ;-)

Hey, if you’re going to steal soft­ware at least do it well!

More gen­er­ally speak­ing, WSUS just looks like a cool tool. You down­load once, apply many, and man­age what patches do/don’t get installed from a cen­tral location.

Dis­claimer: I haven’t tried WSUS, this is just second-hand. We only use appro­pri­ately licensed Microsoft prod­ucts here. I’m pub­lish­ing this because being sub­ver­sive is fun, if a lit­tle child­ish, and this could con­ceiv­ably (legit­i­mately or oth­er­wise) be of use to someone.