Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Typical Windows User Patches Every 5 Days

Posted by timothy on from the about-how-often-I-shave dept.

CWmike writes "The typical home user running Windows faces the 'unreasonable' task of patching software an average of every five days, security research company Secunia said on Thursday. 'It's completely unreasonable to expect users to master so many different patch mechanisms and spend so much time patching,' said Thomas Kristensen, the company's CSO. The result: Few consumers devote the time and attention necessary to stay atop the patching job, which leaves them open to attack. Secunia says that of the users who ran the company's Personal Software Inspector in the last week of January, half had 66 or more programs from 22 or more different vendors on their machines. ... Secunia has published a white paper (PDF) that details its findings."

2 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. sucks to be support by yagu · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I'm the guy in our household responsible for applying our patches, being an IT professional and all.

    Since we have a "few" computers all around the house, it's pretty much every time I sit down to one I have to apply patches, and usually a reboot to boot. Sometimes, it's a rarely used computer that I grab (laptop) just to get a few quick things done, and it requires multiple iterations of patches and reboots. Sigh.

    I find it exasperating that my experience is almost always, "apply these patches", and then you can do some work with Windows. The good news (for me), I'm finally migrating EVERYTHING (as in replacing with) Macs and Linux. Time and money, that's all it takes.

    Interestingly the other day... I got in and was productive immediately on a Windows laptop. Wow! C'est vrai? And when I went to shut it down? "Please do not power down your computer. Windows is installing (3 of 10...) updates..." WTH?

    1. Re:sucks to be support by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And if you have to patch BEFORE you start working, then that's bad, but if you have to patch when you shut down instead, that's bad too. When should these updates happen, ideally?

      I'd say a hell of a lot less frequently than once a week! Ideally, you should be able to tell the PC "download and install updates on shutdown" and when you shut it down, the computer downloads and installs the patches you select, then shuts down.

      Better yet, it should be like Linux -- you only have to reboot if there's there's an update to the kernel.

      --
      Free Martian Whores!