The Joy of Windows Updates

Today’s blog is about “Microsoft Windows” basic stuff. I was just helping a client this morning that couldn’t get his 3rd party app to work because of old Windows Updates not being installed. We looked and he had over 170, 2 important, but the other 168 were optional, but critical for his application to work.

Let’s begin with some easy stuff, should you let Windows install your updates automatically? Well, if you’re like me, I work 24×7 on my computer and leave lots of open unsaved documents rolling all day. So if Windows does an update at 3:00 am (default setting usually), bye bye unsaved data. Windows doesn’t care or ask you “Would you like to save your data before I force restart the computer”.

Nope.

But you can control when Windows installs or downloads, by going to your Control Panel and changing the settings. I recommend getting them downloaded and  YOU install them, when you have your data saved, backed up and ready to go. (see picture below)

Windows Updates can glitch and might not install correctly. So be warned you might wake up at 6:00 to a messed up computer (If you let Windows do the 3:00 am automatic download and install), or if you chose to do the updates at 3:00 in the afternoon, if there is a glitch, you can at least call tech support if you can’t fix it yourself. 6:00 am is not a good time to find out you can’t work for the morning.

Now some folks refuse to do any Windows Updates, I’m not against what a client prefers, but if they hire me to fix a problem and updates are required, I have no hacking skills to get around that unfortunately and have to do updates to get the other software to work.

To close, you can

• Opt to get them automatically,
• Install and download when you want
• Check for updates, but then you chose when to download and install
• Never check, and it’s not what we recommend either
• Hire us to help you manage your updates (to read more about our plan click here)

Category: Uncategorized