Background Intelligent Transfer Service

[Black Viper]

Discussion of the Background Intelligent Transfer Service located in Windows Vista SP1.

Background Intelligent Transfer Service
Service Information: http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/Services/Background_Intelligent_Transfer_Service.htm

[Sir Joe]

Hi BV  ...
You talk of manual updates and automatic updates.
I leave the Update settings in "do not alert me", so that there should not be services running all the time, and I can check manually when I want (usually once a week, when I go in town, where I can have a good connection, while here at home in the country I have a prehistoric dial up one..., 24kbps!).
In this case, can I put it in Manual? If I put it in Manual will I be able to stop a download and resume it later?
As you say "Place all four in automatic if you do not wish to update manually" I imagine that if I want to update only manually I can put the four in Manual...
And the other three you talk about in the OP? Can they go in Manual?
(do you like the "OP" abbreviation? )

[Black Viper]

All four can be placed in manual and stopped if you do not desire to automatically update. However, if you use Windows Update, BITS as well as the other three will still need to be either "started" or placed into automatic and rebooted for Windows Update to function.

[Sir Joe]

Is this because of what you have told, that even if in Manual a service is supposed to start if needed, very often it will not?
I have set Cryptographic Services and BITS in Delayed (Event Log did not allowed me), in the hope that at least the startup would have been faster. Is this a good criteria? 

[MaggieToo9]

I run XP SP2 with 3 hotfixes for actual bugs (I have these downloaded and saved because Microsoft makes them difficult to dl and install - requiring passwords!! to unzip them of all things).  I will never install SP3, VISTA, Win7, MinWin, or anything "LIVE" from MS (I got bitten by WinLiveID - but that's a different - and long - story).  I don't want anymore MS spyware and controlware on my PC than I've already got.  When XP SP2 doesn't do it for me, then I'll do Linux.

Anyway...
I don't do Windows Updates at all because I don't have time to research every patchup to the poorly designed OS and I don't trust Microsoft not to sneak something ELSE onto my PC that they failed to mention in the patch description.  So, in this case, do I need BITS (or the other 3 items) for anything? 

In all the years I have been running XP, AVAST, and ZoneAlarm, I have never gotten any malware - and no adware or spyware since I've been running Spywareblaster with autoupdate.  I also have unnecessary ports and services disabled (thanks to you) and some other security tweaks.  I use image files of my C partition, maintain a backup duplicate of my data partition (and some C files I don't want clobbered when I restore an image), and I encrypt (256-bit AES with long nonsense key) EVERYthing on my PC that could possibly be used for financial or identity theft.

That said, I would still like to have HONEST patches that ONLY do what they say they do, that FIX software failure points - and do NOTHING ELSE that isn't stated in the description - AND don't disable some feature without stating that fact in the description. 

Is there a list anywhere of simple descriptions of TRULY "critical" patches specifically for simple, wired, un-networked PCs - that can be downloaded and SAVED and installed separately later?   Is the BITS file group necessary if you download and save a patch from MS?  If so, is there somewhere else to get patches that doesn't depend on these dangerous services?

MaggieAnn