Patches are a way of life these days. From correcting program crashes to shutting down zero-day exploits, the patch cycle has become integral to staying safe in the online computing world. There are a number of ways that you can go about keeping your system patches current. The easiest method is to make sure that the Automatic Updates feature is enabled.
Follow these steps to check your Automatic Updates status:
1. Go to Start | Control Panel.
2. Choose Security Center.
3. Make sure that the Automatic Updates option is set to On.
If your Automatic Updates setting is Off, click the button marked Turn on Automatic Updates. Besides just enabling Automatic Updates, you can also configure how the feature works. At the bottom of the Security Center screen, click the Automatic Updates option under the heading "Manage security settings for." This will open up a screen.
From this window, you can make a number of changes in Automatic Updates' default behavior. The default (and recommended) option is Automatic. When you select the Automatic option, you can also decide how often you want to install updates. Your choices are Every Day, Every Sunday, Every Monday, etc. As for times, you can choose any hour of the day that is convenient, but the default selection is to install updates every day at 3 AM. For most people, this will work fine, if the machine is left on for the night.
You other automatic update options are:
- Download the updates, but install them manually.
- Don't download any updates, but notify the user when new updates are available for download.
- Turn off Automatic Updates altogether. This is not recommended at all.
By the way, if you fail to stay current on service packs for Windows XP, you're out of luck on updates. Microsoft is making new Windows updates available only to those that have installed Service Pack 2
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