Microsoft Update Headaches

http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s%253D701%2526a%253D21023,00.asp

http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s%253D700%2526a%253D21231,00.asp

Microsoft users are having some headaches with updates.
So what else is new?

The problems include:

many of Microsoft's patches are flawed & Microsoft has to keep coming out
with patches to fix patches (I think I have heard this story before) & this
applies to XP;

Microsoft patches, unlike IBM patches, are not designed so that anyone other
than Microsoft knows what the heck is going on, which means that MS is even
more vulnerable than IBM for a hacker to get in & cause people to get false
updates that you think were authorized by MS;

you cannot set the update wizard to only update the Microsoft software that
you are interested in updating ... it updates everything ... so for example,
if you do not want to update IE because of a conflict with some other non-MS
software that only works on a particular version of IE, or even a modified
version, like I have with AOL, tough luck - if you use Microsoft updates to
get at latest office fixes or some other MS software - it updates everything
you have to the latest MS version, which could be a flawed version.

The e-week articles quote a lot of people who have learned that automated
updates are not worth the Microsoft headaches, with specifics of the horrible
stuff that happened to them, and their various reasons for low opinions of
the Microsoft Update site.

And now the Microsoft bugs have got so bad that the update site is
non-functional for  users on all kinds of Windows platforms, since late last
week.  Microsoft officials say the problem happened when they did a DNS
upgrade ... no suprise that an Microsoft upgrade would crash something & the
odds are that Microsoft will occasionally be one of the victims.

Normally some 8 million people visit Microsoft Update site each week to
download fixes.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)