FAQShop.com : What's the Relationship Between BITS and the Automatic Updates Service?

What's the Relationship Between BITS and the Automatic Updates Service?

What relationship does the Background Intelligent Transfer Service have with the Automatic Updates service? Does one depend on the other? We are rolling out Software Update Services and I have some desktops that will not start the Background Intelligent Transfer Service.

Contributed By: Mahmood Dhalla [MSFT]
Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is a technology that Auto Update uses to download the files in the background without hindering the network activities of your users. Therefore, AU depends on BITS being available to download the files for it.

BITS is also being used by other applications to do background file transfers. I am CC'ing the BITS newsgroup as well and any issues you have specific to BITS will catch attention over there :)

Please check the event log of these desktops and tell us what the system is complaining about not being able to start BITS so we can investigate.