Hide language updates on Vista (or hide optional updates)

PaulSpoerry | May 9, 2007

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If you’re like me, you keep your system up to date and patched. It’s good practice, but a bit annoying under Vista (at least under Ultimate Edition) because even if you’ve applied all the updates you need you’re constantly shown that you have 14 optional updates. Turns out they’re all language packs… I’m pretty sureÂ I don’t need Chinese or Dutch language packs installed.

It turns out it’s pretty easy to hide them from view. Open Windows Update and click on View available updates. You’ll see something like this:

Notice all the languages that you’ll never have a need to use. All you have to do to hide these updates, is to right-click on an item in the list, and choose â€œHide updateâ€ from the menu.

Pretty easy eh? Now when you go to Windows Update you’ll see what you expect: “No new updates available…”. If you ever want them back thereâ€™s a â€œRestore hidden updatesâ€ link on the left-hand side of the screen that will let you put them back in the list.

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