How we did it

How we tested the various patch management products.

We installed each product on a Pentium III, 800 GHz system with 256M bytes of RAM running Windows 2000 Server. This system resided on a network of five systems running Windows 2000 Workstation, Windows 2000 Server Gold, Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 2 and SQL Server 2000, Windows 2000 Workstation SP3, and Windows Server 2003 RC1. Each system had one or two hot-fixes installed, but all systems were missing several patches. We scanned each system for missing patches and deployed many hot-fixes to test the deployment functionality of each product. We periodically updated the patch information in the product where necessary and generated reports to help us understand which patches were missing on each system and which patches were installed.

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