Security Patches – Lots of Big Updates

Microsoft Patches – Lots of Big Updates

So you’re finally on Windows 10 (at least you should be). Microsoft has some significant updates for the Windows 10 machines. These are all good updates, no concerns, but the files are larger than usual, so downloading them during a patch management window is taking longer than you’re used to.

So how do we know all of this? Well, we have Windows 10 computers, but the real answer is the calls we’ve been receiving. Several of our clients have shut down the updates because they were taking too long and didn’t want to wait. The end result was that the computer became ‘frozen’ and wouldn’t respond. In two cases, we actually had to rebuild the computer; time-consuming and expensive!

For many of our clients, we review the Microsoft patches each week, determine if they’re ready and stable to be released, approve them, then they automatically get ‘pushed’ out to our clients’ computers on a pre-determined day and time. This process is Patch Automation, a service we provide to our clients. Sometimes the computer needs to restart, other times they just install without the reboot.

If you have patch management in place, please let your staff know about this longer install cycle and ask them to be patient. They can do some planning ahead so they’re not in a rush trying to get to a meeting only to find they have to wait for the computer to finish the updates. – CMW