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Every time that I sit down at a friends machine the first thing I do is see how many security patches need to be installed. It is always baffling, but it is not unusual for me to sit down at a machine that has not been patched in as many as 6 months. Let me fill you in on a secret, Microsoft and Apple spend many hours writing and releasing these patches for you. Take advantage of them they will save your skin. Because I can’t get any of my family to move over to the Mac I will concentrate on Windows.

1. The first thing to do is go to Start / Control Panel / Security Center / Automatic Updates. Make sure that the button next to Automatic is filled and hit OK. This will automatically download all of the important updates from Microsoft so that you don’t have to think about it, but…
2. In true Microsoft form automatic does not really mean automatic. Every now and then you will see a small yellow shield appear in the task bar (the row of icons in the bottom right corner fo the scree). If you click on this yellow shield it will ask you if you want to install the updates. Select the express option and hit OK. It will install all of the updates for you and probably ask you to reboot the computer. It is probably a good idea to make sure you are ready to reboot, i.e. not busy, because Windows will bug you to death wanting you to reboot.

For those of you that are feeling really brave this process may be performed manually by going to update.microsoft.com. You will have to use Internet Explorer for this as it requires some scripts that can only be run in IE, sorry Firefox users (we will talk about Firefox a little later). You can also get to this from the menu bar at the top of Internet Explorer. Go to tools / Windows Update. This will take you to the same place.
To use Windows Update you will have to have a fully licensed verison of Windows XP, 2000, or Lord forbid Windows 98. You may be asked to validate your license so just say OK as you get to these pages. If when you run Windows Update you see a ton of patches that need to be installed make sure you run it again after the reboot as some patches require previous patches to be installed first before they can download. Get busy updating - it will save you hours of headaches. You can sleep safely at night knowing that your windows machine is totally safe from the evil side of the Internet.