Weekend project – Do computer updates on a small business in Clayton
I originally told clients, that asked me, to hold off on that SP3 update until it had been out a while. It was actually released in May of 2008. With MS Service packs, there are some small changes that usually get made after initial release. Usuallly there ends up being some weird little bug that only appears after it has been installed a few hundred thousand times. I advise people to NOT be the first adopter -especially in business computer environments.
In this case, not a single one had moved to SP3 though some updates DID seem to have filtered through. All in all, it is a lot of fun to update a bunch of computers at one time – start one, get it to a good point, and start the next. Matt Sharpe assisted me in this project. I did the cleanup and he did the updates. In 5 hours, we got 7 of the computers up to speed – though some were actually still installing updates when we had to leave for the day. I think, besides some of these machines being somewhat slow, the limiting factor was the speed of the update downloads. I believe we taxed the heck out of their DSL connection doing updates on up to 8 machines at one time. I will pickup again on Monday am by just finishing those computers out with reboots as needed. It won’t hurt to be around in case any of their apps have been adversely affected by the updates.
I think this is an example of why it is important, for the most part, to always HAVE a friendly neighborhood computer services company around – to make sure things don’t get out of sync that far. Did it affect them adversely? Don’t think so. Didn’t really hear of any huge virus outbreaks or anything in the year and a half or more of no updates. But neither do I think it good to have updates that far out of sync. Perhaps I am just accustomed to the “MUST DO IT NOW” attitude of Microsoft towards updates. But if I were in their shoes, I think I would want to have the computer repair/computer service tech/geek around a bit more frequently. I’ll talk to him about that on Monday!
If you’re on Facebook, join the discussion “How often do YOU update your computers?” in the “Lizardwebs Computer Services” group page!
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