Category Archives: Tutorials

How To Receive Notifications When Computers Go Offline Or Come Online

By Scott | Published: July 28, 2014

Let’s say you’re working through a list of computers to install Windows Update or a third-party software product, but only a percentage of the computers are actually online. The reason, of course, is because your organization provides laptops to its employees, but at any given time there are a lot of people who either aren’t […]

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Hiding Windows Updates Remotely In a Non-WSUS Environment

By Scott | Published: July 14, 2014

If you’re using BatchPatch in an environment that has no WSUS server, there might be times when computers show more available updates than you actually want to install. For example, perhaps you don’t want to install new versions of IE or .NET when you’re installing Windows Updates, but you do want to install updates to […]

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Create a Consolidated Report of Windows Update History

By Scott | Published: July 8, 2014

We have received numerous requests for the ability to create Windows Update history reports with BatchPatch. I’m happy to announced that the latest build of BatchPatch (2014.07.01) has a new reporting option that enables you to quickly retrieve the entire history of Windows Update actions from target computers. The output is consolidated so that you […]

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Wake On LAN with BatchPatch

By Scott | Published: June 9, 2014

BatchPatch provides Wake On LAN (WoL) capabilities, which makes it convenient when you need to remotely power-on (wake) computers on your network. Some folks like to use Wake On LAN in conjunction with their routine maintenance for patching / updating their computers. The reason this can work nicely is because once you have Wake On […]

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Remotely Install Windows Updates – A Guide To Updating Your Computers Remotely

By Scott | Published: May 29, 2014

It’s not necessarily as straightforward as it seems like it might be to remotely install Windows updates. Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) provides a significant amount of help with this process, but there are still a number of important considerations to keep in mind. The great news about WSUS is that it’s free to use […]

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Getting Started with BatchPatch

By Scott | Published: May 13, 2014

If you just downloaded BatchPatch for the first time, let’s go through the things that you need to have in place for the software to function properly. PsExec: Download PsExec from Microsoft PsExec needs to be placed in the Windows PATH of the computer that is running BatchPatch (target computers do *NOT* need psexec). The […]

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Using BatchPatch to Execute a Custom Script to Retrieve the Count of CPU Sockets, Cores, and Logical Processors from Remote Computers

By Scott | Published: April 28, 2014

One of the cool things about BatchPatch is that you can use it with your own scripts to retrieve information from many target computers. For the sake of this blog posting, let’s look at an example where an administrator wants to retrieve the count of CPU cores from his/her target machines. Let’s start with the […]

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BatchPatch Authentication in Domain and Workgroup (non-domain) Environments

By Scott | Published: April 16, 2014

When we set out to create BatchPatch, one of our primary concerns was to ensure that the software would be as easy to use as possible. We believe we were successful in that endeavor. However, since every network environment is unique, there are a few things that need to be understood about the BatchPatch authentication […]

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How to Hard-Code Your Own Custom Commands in the BatchPatch Actions Menu

By Scott | Published: April 8, 2014

We have done our best to make sure that all of the typical commands a Systems Administrator might need to run on computers in his/her network have been included in BatchPatch, so that it’s very easy to get information from remote computers with just a couple of clicks. That said, if there is a command […]

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How To Send Email Notifications In BatchPatch

By Scott | Published: March 31, 2014

We confess… The BatchPatch email notifications feature is not the most intuitive aspect of BatchPatch. However, it’s actually very simple to use, and my goal with this posting is to illustrate how to use email notifications in BatchPatch. The original design of BatchPatch was focused on real-time patching, with the idea that any action a […]

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