I have a silly question.
I have taken over a WSUS server. It has a couple hundred superceded updates. I have disapproved them. Is this correct thing to do? as I understand there are newer updates and it would be damaging and useless to install these.
I suggest that you decline (not just disapprove) updates that you know you will not use or need. Superseded updates are part of this. Keeping a clean WSUS installation is fairly important for performance.
Not damaging but probably useless. WSUS doesn't actually download them until you approve them so there is no harm in leaving them there. Disapproving them takes them out of your view, which has its own benefits when looking for new updates to approve so yes you can disapprove them.
Another place to look in WSUS is which products you are checking for updates to make sure you aren't seeing updates for products you don't even have in your environment. As far as I know, there is no way to avoid seeing the updates for the Itanium processors though which sucks.
I find the best practice is to approve superseded updates first, and then remove them later, once you are sure they're no longer needed.
WSUS will only install the superseded updates on computers that need them, and could save you some trouble down the road..
If you're going to decline or disapprove superseded updates, make sure you do so carefully.
Read the following:
From technet.microsoft.com on WSUS
It doesn't really matter. When you run the WSUS cleanup wizard from the management console, it should get rid of anything that's been superseded anyway. It's not going to harm anything by declining them, but you could just as well run that tool every couple of months to tidy up the DB anyway.