The Easiest Way to Keep Your Computer Up To Date

Updates are crucial for all our devices. They’re released regularly to help protect us from the security flaws and vulnerabilities that cyber criminals love to exploit. Updates also help us by making software and applications more usable and adding new features.

It’s best practice to run updates as soon as possible on every machine across your business. If you already do this, you can give yourself a high five.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has reported that there is an enormous number of Windows PCs that aren’t up to date.

So, what’s happening? Is it just staff clicking the ‘later’ button when they get the update notifications? That certainly may account for some of it. Updates can be time consuming and sometimes people need to get on with their work. Though we certainly don’t condone this behaviour, we do understand it.

Technical problems with updates may account for some of these out-of-date PCs too, but the majority of update issues are coming from something else entirely. It turns out that Windows machines often need to be connected to the internet for a very long time for updates to work properly.

Microsoft’s recently explained that when an update is installed, a device must remain on and connected to Windows Update for a minimum of two consecutive hours, and six hours in total. That gives your device time to successfully download the update and install it.

The best way to make sure all your devices are successfully updated every time is to insist that your team leave their devices powered on and connected overnight.

This also means that you have to check your Power Management settings to stop your devices from going into hibernation mode or deep sleep too quickly.

To offset any environmental impact, you should also ensure you’re following the recommended power settings on each device.

If you’d like any help checking that all your devices are running the latest security updates, book a 15 minute, no obligation call with us at www.durham-it.ca/book-a-call/.

Published with permission from Your Tech Updates.