Windows Update - messing around

Every now and then I need to update an Windows XP system. In contrast to a Debian based system where you may use apt-get you just have to sit and wait for the Windows Update service to work on it's own and "suddenly" popup a yellow notification in the system tray when it feels it is ready.

As I got tired of this behaviour I found this useful page to shed some light on the situation:
http://www.moundalexis.com/tm/2010/01/07/windows-update-wuauclt-command-line-switches/

That refers to non-XP Windows, but I found some of it to work on XP also.

It appears that Windows Update has a log located here:
%systemroot%\WindowsUpdate.log
(e.g. C:\Windows\WindowsUpdate.log)

Check if there are (already downloaded?) patches to apply
wuauclt /scannow

You may trigger an update check by running:
wuauclt /detectnow
Nothing is outputted when running it in the console, but maybe something is happening in the log.

Other useful stuff are:
wuauclt /r /ReportNow
Which will "force the client to send updated status to the WSUS server. It may take a minute or two for the server to reconcile and display the updated status."

The update service can also be restarted:
net stop wuauserv
net start wuauserv