Updates galore in Microsoft's biggest ever Patch Tuesday Microsoft has patched a record 64 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and five other software packages, many of which allowed attackers to remotely install malware on end user machines. The most important fixes addressed a vulnerability in the Internet Explorer browser that was exploited in last month's Pwn2Own contest. Although …
One of our devs here says that the .NET framework updates are slower than normal to install. Previously, they did their optimization steps after installation, but this time round they seem to run them synchronously.
Also it seems like it might take more than one pass for the install to complete, so you need to keep re-running Windows Update until it says that there's nothing left to update. But that's nothing new.
You ought to look into a backup plan.
I hear Acronis and a pair of Sata drives will do.
But hey if you want to make it fun, consider an few icy docks (pricey docks?!?), or vantec(s) so you can slide your drives in and out on the fly. I have to cold boot to clone my OS, and the data drives are done on the fly without any software except ztree. Clonezilla can clone also if you don't have acronis.
Whatever you do, take your time, do it right, Make it Fun. It might also be time too buy a Imation CLIP (with the data lock switch) to backup your KeePass or KeePassX passwords. Hopefully your not storing such nonsense on paper lists still.
Anyway, it gives serious peace of mind for the nonsense of patching, tweaking and debugging a production box. It's peace of mind I can't live without. Now I just hope that damned stinking Fukushima situation stops, I am not enjoying this at all out here in California. Contrary to the propaganda spewed here at El Reg recently. (Man El Reg pissed me off with that, but you know, what goes around, comes around.)
I guess it is way too much paranoid behaviour to wait for horror stories while the real horror story is the zero day bugs fixed by this update.
Every update is seperate, seperately could be removed and there is also system restore on windows. At last resort, system files are (unfortunately) there, packed in cab files on startup disk.
It is OS X which you gotta do a full startup disk image on time/mission critical machines since time machine does file backups, too slow to restore.
Microsoft has always been a marketing company - not a software company. Sure, it takes programmers on board, but its directors are more interested in making money than making quality software. The only reason we see as many patches as we do is because of marketing - the more exposure Microsoft gets, the more its market share grows.
Those who run MS products should expect this kind of quality, top-notch service by now, and thumbs down to anyone who thinks that script-kiddie, freetard systems like Linux, with their la-dee-da longer uptimes and superior stability, will actually become effective replacements for bloated, overrated operating environments.
(In honesty, I'm glad I upgraded from 98SE to XP when I did. Just not quite looking forward to the Win7 leap.)
MS sure knows what kind of headlines they will get when they release 21 updates (end user,win update) and it is not a good way to do PR allthough it is how it should be done.
Seperate updates, documentation for each update, central way to make systems ignore update (if not good). That is how linux/bsd/ms works. The company doing the PR trick is Apple, they simply say "here, update to 20000 files, also 300 perl/python scripts will run, trust to time machine". Why? Because they don't want to make headlines releasing 23 seperate updates.
Like it is a bad thing... Thanks to trolls.
Sometimes we do have issues with MS updates, we run them on test kit first, and this update batch looked good. But this time it was an nVidia update that sneaked in with the Windows updates and caught us out, and killed the networking on some of our older desktops with nVidia mobos. Bit annoyed that a supposedly MS-tested driver update could prove so troublesome but a roll-back of the built-in NIC driver cured the problem. Silly us for not using a more representative set of test machines I suppose.
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