- Why You Should Worry About Keeping Your Computer Safe
- Getting to Everything Security Related in Vista
- What Spyware and Malware Are and How Your Computer Gets Them
- Symptoms of Malware on Your Computer
- Getting Rid of and Keeping Malware Off Your Computer
- Windows Defender
- What to Do If You Suspect Malware But Can't Get a Pop-Up to Close
- What Is a Virus and How Is It Different from Spyware?
- Protecting Your Computer from Viruses
- Determining If You Have a Virus
- The Importance of Automatic Updates
- Turning On Automatic Updating
- What Is Windows Firewall?
- Why You Should Back Up Your Computer
- Backing Up the Files on Your Computer
- Backing Up Your Entire Computer
- Where to Store Backups
- Restoring Your Computer from a Backup
- Automatically Backing Up Your Computer
- What Is Service Pack 1 (a.k.a. SP1)?
- How Do I Get SP1?
- How Do I Install SP1?
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Importance of Automatic Updates
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Automatic updates are one of the main ways you can protect your computer. Let me lay it out for you. Wouldn’t it be great if Microsoft developed an operating system that automatically and unequivocally protected your computer from every potential threat or virus out there forever? Sure it would. But that is not the reality. The reality is that when they built Windows Vista it did protect against any threats that were known at the time. However, the human spirit is one heck of a resilient one. If at first you don’t succeed, then try again, right? Well that is how software hackers operate. There are those geeky genius kids or adults who have nothing better to do with their time than sit in front of their computers and develop ways to harm other computers. As they come up with new ways to exploit your operating system or the software on it, Microsoft creates fixes and updates to help thwart those exploits. That’s where turning on Automatic Updating comes in. Over the years, we’ve all heard the horror stories about computers from large companies being hacked into and exploited in some way. Well, most of those attacks have happened because the computers were not kept up-to-date. In fact, in very few circumstances did an attack result from a brand spanking new vulnerability that Windows didn’t already have an update ready for. The problem has been that people just didn’t install the update to close that vulnerability. So it’s vital to turn Automatic Updating on and leave it on. Let the tools that are already in Vista to help protect you do their job.