In
(PeteCresswell) said:
Per Char Jackson:
I think part of it is my inner control-freak plus a certain
amount of laziness.
To avoid the unexpected "Installing n updates....." when I need
to reboot in a hurry (as in I'm working on something and drinking
too much coffee....) I turn automatic updates off.
Then it becomes a matter of taking the trouble to apply them....
In the "32" case, I had been troubleshooting some boot-time
weirdnesses introduced when I installed a certain DVD transcoder
or/and a surveillance camera monitoring application.
In that case, I reverted to a known good image that was over a
year old - so the large number of updates should have been no
surprise.... but it was bc I had updates turned off and forgot to
click on the fine print.
I've devolved into applying other-than-security updates
one-by-one and checking the system after each.
Security updates, I'll apply as they come - but always have an
image of the "Before" system.
The motivation for that came from the IE 8 install that was part
of the 32. That one, I still have in the que bc it increases
boot time to almost five minutes. Yeah, that doesn't sound
right.... but it does and I'm too clueless to even guess why...
it just does... and I've replicated it several times, starting
with images that boots to NAS availability in 1:34-1:45.
Maybe I just have too much time on my hands....
Been there and done that. Ever noticed how those images with the fewest
number of updates are so rock solid? I too noticed that. And in 2008 I
bought an Asus EeePC 701 was a 4GB SSD on the motherboard that came with
XP SP2. There was no hope of getting SP3 installed or almost virtually
no other updates.
I thought for sure this machine would be a malware magnet and I made
backups all of the time just waiting. And after a year, nothing at all.
Of course you start thinking, how can that be? That is just impossible.
As that goes against everything we have been taught.
Something just isn't right and I have over 20 laptops here and I had
taken 6 of them and I quit updating them too. I figured many one I was
just lucky or something. But six more just waiting to be infected from
the lack of updates just can't be just being lucky anymore.
I ran them for four years and absolutely nothing. They were running
solid as a rock while the ones that were getting updates were having
stability problems. As every time you install an update, you had to
cross your fingers hoping it would work okay afterwards. Most of the
time, it did. But sometimes it didn't.
And Microsoft isn't helping by taking up to 7 years to plug some
security holes. And when they do patch a hole, hackers quickly find
holes in the new patch to use. This process doesn't work. Microsoft
works too slow and hackers work too fast.
What works so much better is AV real time scanners. Security holes? No
problem, as AV scanners are monitoring all of your ports anyway. And AV
doesn't take 7 years to stop new malware. As they are updated daily. And
if that isn't enough protection for you, there are also sandboxes. Which
even stops zero day malware dead in its tracks.
