Giles – I’m not sure I fully understand what you mean about hiding updates in a preference rather than having to apply hide to rows. When you hide an update on a target computer using BatchPatch, BatchPatch instructs that target computer to hide the update so that Windows Update on that computer no longer includes that update in the list of updates that it presents for download/installation. Once that operation has been executed and an update has been hidden, it’s actually hidden on the target computer. It’s not hidden in BatchPatch, if you know what I mean. So for example, if you hide the update and then go to the computer and look at the Windows Update control panel GUI, the update will no longer appear there either. And so for this reason, it is done on a per-row/per-host basis. The instruction only needs to be executed one time, and then once that update has been hidden, it will remain hidden until/unless you choose to unhide it. So, it’s not something that you would hide via a BatchPatch setting/preference because it’s not a setting per se. It is an instruction/action that must be executed on the target computer. More on hiding updates: Hiding Windows Updates Remotely
Now, while hiding updates is one way of not ever downloading/installing a particular update or set of updates on target computers, you can also use a filter list to only download/install certain updates. The following link demonstrates how to use both the hide option mentioned above or the filter list option mentioned after that.
Remotely Install Only A Subset Of Available Windows Updates
-Doug