Order Now!
Windows 7 for XP ProfessionalsUpdating Support Skills from XP to Windows 7by Bink.nu's Raymond Comvalius
There are 90 guest(s) online.
There are 0 member(s) online.
Last month, Windows bloggers and news sites began reporting that they'd noticed Windows Update, the utility that downloads and installs fixes from Microsoft, was surreptitiously updating Windows machines.
A few weeks later, users alleged that there had been an unannounced change: Windows Update patched itself without informing the user, and according to critics, broke Windows Update in the process.
Now there's new anger over a new product update being pushed out, even if people don't run Windows Update. The product revision in question is Windows Desktop Search 3.01 (WDS), which Microsoft had been pushing out with Windows Live automatically. Some users charge that it seems as if the new version is being pushed out with any Windows update.
What's worse, users claim that once WDS is installed, it begins indexing the computer. If a user tries to uninstall the feature, it forces the computer to reboot (no reboot had been required when WDS was initially installed) and then tries to reinstall itself again, when they go to Windows Update.
WDS is installed not only on desktop computers but servers as well. This is keeping the WDS support board very busy.
Microsoft declined to comment when contacted by InternetNews.com. However, the Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) group confirmed in a blog posting that some users were seeing unexpected updates.
According to the post, WSUS automatically auto-approves updates to existing products by default, and WSUS assumed in this case that WDS was a revision to software already installed on the user's computer.
"So what happened with this revision and why did it seemingly deploy itself to all systems in [your] environment?" WSUS Project Manager Bobbie Harder wrote in the post. "WSUS by default is set to auto-approve update revisions to minimize administrative overhead and make sure distribution 'just works' ... it may have appeared as if this update was deployed without approval. The initial version of the update would have had to have been approved, and the 'auto-approve revisions' option on (by default) in order for this revision to have also been approved and deployed."
Despite the Windows Update team's response, Microsoft is still getting an earful, particularly from admins who have to remove WDS from all their office computers.
Continue At Source
In my opinion Automatics is a very valuable tool that I would not want to do without. Without Automatic Updates a lot of computers would go unpatched and become compromised.
I see three groups of users.
There are the people who can't be bothered with updates (people who are probably still running the expired version of NAV2001 that came with their computer). For those people I believe Automatic Updates should be set to automatically download and install updates at a certain time.
For those of us who have a clue about our computers I believe Automatic Updates should be set to automatically download but let us choose what to install or not. Chances are my computer will download the updates sometime while I'm away from it. I’m just as impatient as the next guy. When I get ready to look at updates I don't have to wait while it downloads 100MB of updates. I want to tell it what updates to install, hide the rest, install updates then I restart it.
The third group is corporate IT. In the business world there are special applications and every patch needs to be tested for unwanted consequences before it gets rolled out. Where I work we use the WSUS server. We trust it to work correctly the way we set it up. It was quite a surprise when several people turned up with Windows Desktop Search installed when we never approved it. Microsoft apologized for the mix-up. Mistakes happen. In the case of my company, we were going to push it out anyways as part of our Office 2007 rollout next month.
That’s my two cents.
I agree. The first news story about Windows Update , updating itself was blown out of proportion for no real reason. People made it sound like the system was changing around OS files when all it did, which is what it always did for years, was update the WU files (two of them iirc).
It has to do that so it can find newer updates and so on. MS explained this off anyways.
And people should use AU, The majority of home users don't bother with this part of their OS, yet leave their PCs on 24/7 when there is no real need for them to do so. I leave mine on all the time because it's on doing work, beit encoding or downloading/uploading files etc.