kriston's Journal: How to kick-start Windows 7 updates

Do you want to kick-start Windows 7 updates for a computer you've built or set up for someone else? This is what I do and it mitigates the threats to newly-installed machines. It installs certain libraries and other dependencies that trigger Windows Update to give you the latest and greatest. You can let the user do the Service Pack updates at a later time. In this situation we are bootstrapping the update process for most of the important libraries and software you care about without buying Microsoft Office and installing the most important updates before you leave the user to his own devices.

Download and install the following software in this order on another PC and put them on a USB drive.
Do not connect your new computer to the internet yet.
Run these installers in this order. Nothing should ask you to reboot, but if it does, let it reboot and continue with the next one.

Microsoft Word Viewer 2003 (the latest is Word 2003).
Microsoft Visio Viewer
Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2007
Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2007 SP1 Update
Microsoft Excel Viewer 2007
Microsoft File Format Converters
Microsoft DirectX Redist
Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 (Windows Vista and XP Only, x86 and x64 are in the same download)
Microsoft .NET 4.0 Full (x86 and x64 are in the same download)
Microsoft Security Essentials

Restart your computer.
Go to the Windows Update control panel, click "Check for updates," and then install all of the Required and Optional ones.
After you're done with all this, go to the Windows Update control panel and ask it to install "for all Microsoft products". This is somewhat more difficult to find.
Go to Windows Update and hit "Check for updates" again and install everything.

Note that Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 includes .NET 2.x and 1.x inside it. Windows 7 has 3.5 SP1 built in already. Windows Vista may or may not depending how old it is.