Updates on Vista

[travelin cat]

We have an HP running Vista for testing, the rest of our shop are Macs and we are all proficient on them but know very little about PC OS's.

My question is why is the Vista machine regularly downloading updates without asking my permission? I'll be sitting at my desk and notice that the PC has restarted itself and is installing something.

Can I turn off these updates? Would that be disastrous?

Should I just ignore them?

[jdMorgan]

It's downloading updates because it needs to, in order to fix the most-recently-identified vulnerabilities... (Read that statement any way you like) :)

You can change the Automatic Update settings by using the Control Panel, selecting "Download and notify only" mode, or set a time (of day) to automatically install updates. Start->Control Panel->Automatic updates.

Don't turn this off, though, or you'll miss all the security fixes that Windows needs to stay safe.

Jim

[kaled]

Assuming that you have antivirus software installed and don't use it for banking, browsing dodgy sites or email, you can probably turn off updates safely (if you want to).

I only ever install updates manually and I usually wait until there are about a dozen or so to install.

Kaled.

[travelin cat]

Thanks to both of you. As this machine is only used to test our own sites, no email, banking or anything else, I'm going to go as minimal as possible.

[kaled]

I should also have mentioned that my advice only applies if the computer is isolated, i.e. not connected to a network. However, since all your other computers are Macs, this doesn't apply.

Kaled.