Microsoft to Release 6 Security Updates Next Week

An anonymous reader wrote in with an article that leads: "Microsoft will release six groups of security patches next week, including three critical updates for Windows and Excel users. The critical updates will fix bugs in many different versions of Microsoft's products including the latest versions of Excel, Windows XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003, Microsoft said."

Comments

Hmmmn

[Jaaay]

This shows the importance of a good NAT firewall. However it'd be interesting to know if the user must click allow on a lot of UAC warnings first to be compromised or it comes through clean since this is supposed to be one of the main benefits of Vista. The UAC works reasonably well for me, it's just annoying when stupid companies like ASUS ship "Vista Ready" cds in the box that have unsigned code that generate a lot of warnings.

This is just great!

[CaptainZapp]

Time to patch my Laptop (Samsung, XP Pro legally licensed). There's only one problem with that:

When I start Windows Update it informs me that it needs updating. Attempting to do so leads to a carped update with some error code. In short: Without the "improved" version of the software no more Windows update for me and since getting the "improved" version fails to install in the first place...

This seems to be a known problem for which there doesn't ssem to be a fix yet. And no! Re-installing the OS is not and option since this toasts my Ubuntu partition.

Microsoft is a company that pisses me off more and more on a daily basis. Thank you for listening.

VMware or Qemu

[flyingfsck]

is the solution. That way, you can concurrently run Windows in a window on Ubuntu and you can recover the wasted Windows disk partition too, using ntfs-3g. Actually, when using an emulator, Win98se works even better than Expee and since you won't be using any of the internet 'features' of Windows anymore, the vulnerabilities won't affect you, while making backups of Windows becomes a breeze using tar. With Windoze on Qemu, you don't need to bother updating it anymore either - it just keeps on working.