Just say the phrase computer updates, and you will get negative responses from most people. We have all heard and some of us have even experienced the horror of a bad update that kills your computer. This is a real fear, and it does happen from time to time, but today I want to give you some of my success stories involving computer updates.
I had a customer a while back that could not get her Office 365 applications to run. She had tried everything she could think of and then called me. I tried all of my normal troubleshooting steps and then took to googling for more possible fixes. Nothing that was suggested fixed her issue with these applications, in fact after trying to uninstall and reinstall we could not even get it to install on her computer.
As a last effort I suggested that we update from Windows 10 to Windows 11 since it seemed her operating system might be corrupt. Sure enough, after updating to Windows 11 we were able to install her applications, and they were once again running correctly.
Many times, I have had customers with issues in their browser (Google Chrome, Edge, Firefox) and the first thing I do is check for updates. That usually solves their issue. When a customer gets the “Blue Screen of Death” over and over again the first place to look is if there are any updates that might solve this.
Aside from these good stories about updates, there is a good reason to complete them. The majority of updates are done to fix known bugs or known vulnerabilities. Based on this, it is important to run updates even if you don’t see any problems on your machine. Software “bugs” don’t always show up immediately. They might not show until a certain feature is used. If you can keep the issue from affecting your system, it is even better.
If you are concerned about updates breaking your system, see this video where I show you how to ensure recovery points are being created before any updates.