Missing something
So a few days ago, for the first time in two weeks I fired up my former laptop, running Windows XP Pro. I had to clean it up, prepping it for sale since I don't have much need for two laptops at the moment.
Within two minutes of logging in, I was greeted with something that I have been missing since switching to Mac OS X. Here it is:
Yep. Windows Update dutifully reported to me that there were no less than four critical updates all of which were to circumvent some attacker from gaining complete control over my computer. I guess it's a good thing it's been sitting very idle and off.
Don't get me wrong -- Mac OS X has a software update feature too. But by and large, it brings me new features and goodies. How refreshing. Every once and a while it includes a service update to some portion of the underlying system (like sendmail, which fortunately was replaced with postfix in Panther).
I don't have a Mac, but if they have less security updates than PC's then I'm sure I would love them. I have about 40 people on my network at work -- and the other day I was installing a new program for one of the higher-ups. The Windows Update flashed up on the screen, and I figured I would go ahead and install the updates for him while I was working. I was completely shocked when I discovered that he had almost 40 security updates to complete -- evidently he had just been clicking "install later" every time the update window popped up over the past 6-7 months. So it took almost two hours to install all these updates from our friends at Microsoft. Why can't they just recompile XP and give us all a new copy? Ugh!!!
At least Microsoft doesn't make you pay $129 to patch a kernel buffer overflow... for an OS that had been the latest version until just a day before!