Slashdot Mirror
Typical Windows User Patches Every 5 Days
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."
I haven't had to patch it in ages!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If only we had automatic updates on Windows.
Running Ubuntu at home, seems like once a week there an update for something or other... Thank God Linux is *FAR* more graceful applying patches - I can update anything on the system and so long as the kernel is not touched, no reboot is required. Windoze just kills me... yo have to reboot for every damn thing! Glad I don't have to deal with that...
For those involved in technology, one of our flaws is the level of expectation we have for the average citizen to be able to cope with. I recall a security expert stating that the average person should be able to memorize a ridiculously large number of random passwords. I developed a strong understanding of controlling memory allocation (back in the early '90's) on PC's, not for some esoteric application, but to get the games my preschoolers were playing to work.
/. crowd will not be having issues with this aspect of maintaining your PC, it's a lot to ask someone with less expertise. If you consider this perspective, it may be more understandable how and why there are so many PC's doing double-duty as part of "Bot-Nets".
It led me to the perspective, that all things being equal, it is fairly easy to argue, that for the home computer market, the "good-guy" lost (as in Apple vs DOS and Windows PCs) simply because Apple did not expect the level of user expertize and intervention to get the things to work.
So, with this situation, though the
there are reasons not to do that on windows. It's not like linux, where that's expected and/or you won't have your filetable crash.
Windows you have a known memory leaks in parts of svchost, so if you keep that thing up for a week you'll see it taking up anywhere from 250mb to more than a gig. This occurs in all versions of windows from XP to 7, 64 bit and 32 all the same
Reboots to your PC on windows don't affect the lifetime of your hardware, although if your MFT was corrupt prior to reboot you're just as screwed after.
Ergo, shutdown/hibernate/basically ensure your computer/laptop is not being powered when you're not going to use it.
Like I always say, Windows is cheap if your time is worth nothing.
That, to me, is more of a Linux quote than a Windows quote. I used to only use Linux. However, when I needed to install something, it wasn't just a pop in a CD, push Next a couple of times, and forget it. No, I had to search online for packages and files and go through message boards and discussion groups trying to find a hint as to why such and such a program is not working. So, a 10 minute install in Windows would equal out to about a 5 hour install in Linux. Linux is cheap if your time is worth nothing. That's why I pay for Windows. (It is also why I no longer use Linux. Everything I was using in Linux has a Windows alternative. Many times, that Windows alternative either came with Windows, or could be found for free/cheap online.)
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
1. updates that frequently fail to install: My friend's laptop constantly complains about needing ~44 critical updates, but any attempt to install them results in an instant "44 updates failed to install". On my laptop, luckily, most updates installed, but I always had 2 or 3 that wouldn't.
And neither I nor anyone I know has ever had it happen.
2. Multiple reboots: Install Windows XP (without any service packs) and try updating. Count the number of reboots. Try a similar test on any Linux distro (pick a CD as old as you want), notice how you only need to reboot once to have all of the updates apply.
Having a ca. 2001 distro update itself automatically to a current distro and actually work, would be an amazing feat on its own.
Still needing to update anything else manually:
Pretty much any application I can think of that I use automatically checks for its own updates.
Start up any arbitrarily old Linux distro and run an update. Notice how everything is up to date (note: By default, most distros don't give you the newest version of most software, but this is intentional and can be worked around by using a distro that doesn't suck).
I would be jaw-droppingly astounded if I could update, say, Red Hat 7.0 or RHEL2.1, or even Ubuntu 4.10 to the latest release of each in a single step and have it work - and that's starting from a clean install. For a machine that had actually been used a bit beforehand with some custom-compiled or out of repo packages, and it would be quite a ride.