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nanarchy on 28 July 2015
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SvennoJ said:
nanarchy said:
Wyrdness said:


It's only hard if you want it to be, even something as simple as 2+2 can be hard for someone who refuses to understand, simple logic is some people want to be safe beforehand to see if new updates don't conflict with their hardware or any software and the past is the reason why.

yep and that very behaviour is what makes malware spread so easily. malware writers rely on people like yourself that are slow at patching, they don't need to discover new vulnerabilities, they just reverse engineer the patch and they have a way to compromise a large volume of users that thinks they know better and can wait for a few days or a few weeks or what usually happens they never get aorund to doing it at all until something happens. You are far more likely to have issues from not patching than patching.

You're exaggerating too. You don't get infected right away if you miss a few patches. I'm up to date again, it took 6 hours to download the 125 patches I was behind, plus a 15 minute 'restarting' sequence afterwards. It still works, looks the same, and according to windows defender my laptop is still fine.
Well almost up to date, apparently it skipped 7, more to update. Now it hangs on preparing to install, I guess it will work eventually.

That's another reason I turned off auto updates. I'm trying to edit videos and the hdd becomes extremely busy from auto updates. At least that was my experience in windows 7. With 3 or 4 updates a week that's just too much nuisance. Since I don't use the pc that much, yet do want to move it around, everytime I shut it down or turned it back on it had to finish installing updates, making a simple move take forever.
Just put a gentle reminder on the taskbar, that's all I want.

Auto updates in win 7 can be scheduled for whatever time you like, it doesn't have to happen while you are working. Win7 also only updates once a month not 3 or 4 times a week. (patch tuesday), only time you get extra is ciritical out of band patches which happen once every few months.

Part of my job is around security and patch management for large organisations. I am in a constant battle with people that have the same dated view on patching.  I usually have to dig through their outages reports over the last few years to demonstrate how wrong their views on patching is. It constantly amazes me the amount of IT people that are out of touch with modern practises. Litterally yesterday I had to drag out the outage reports for an issue that has plagued a company for 5 years, affecting thousands of people and all because there IT people advised them it is safer not to update even though their was a known patch for their issue costing hours of downtime for thousands of people every month.

Another large research place I was at last week was in an absolute mess, they could not actually apply the latest security fixes as their systems were so out of date that it wasn't possible to apply it without applying 100's of patches first. It cost them hugely in overtime and downtime. Another one 2 weeks ago with an organisation that hadn't been updating their SAN firmware or switch firmware and we found the cause of their outages for the last 12 months was a bug that was fixed 3 years ago.

Nearly all of the biggest worms and viri on the internet have relied on peole not patching as they exploit old vulnerabilities.