Updates to Operating Systems & Programs

[mgookin]

My computer experience goes back >30 years. Over the past 15 years I've owned about 10, most of which I still have. I have five turned on at the present time.

In 1998 I had bought a Gateway and it seemed monthly it needed a new hard drive, so they were telling me. After about 6 months of that I found out Gateway and McAffee were a toxic mix which they could never figure out.

In 2001 I had Norton Internet Security on a (different) system. My home was being remodeled so I rented a place down the street. This particular system was not even connected to the internet. The Norton subscription expired. I got tired of harassment from popups telling me my subscription was out of date (it was moot with no internet connection to the machine). So I uninstalled it. Only it had no uninstaller back then. So I followed instructions from Norton's website. It destroyed the machine and all my work in the middle of a semester.

Over this past summer a University network which requires a virus scanner told me my virus definitions were out of date. I told the service to update the files. It updated them. Then it ran a scan without my knowledge or consent. It destroyed the machine by quaranteening dll's. I lost 10 years of work on that machine (much was backed up but not all).

If you put the original WinXP disc into any machine, you'll have an awesome machine. Tell it to install all the updates and it's a piece of trash.

If humans took a pill for every possible "virus" we would die from all the pills. The updates kill the machines.

People are complaining more and more these days that immediately after an update, their system dies.

So why do we do updates? I only do them when some nazi network commando forces me into it. And it kills the machines.

Same for virus scanners; there are more problems associated WITH them than WITHOUT them. I avoid them to every extent possible.

Any thoughts on this subject from some experienced people?

It's like people in IT have too much control and too little common sense. Or it's all a scam to get more of our money.

[Salmon Trout]

Well, my experience with computers goes back > 30 years, too, and I have never had any experiences even remotely like the ones you describe. I have religiously applied every update that came out to MS-DOS 3.30 to 6.22, Windows 3.1, WFWG 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE, 2000, XP SP1 SP2 SP3 Vista and 7, plus various Linux distros from Slackware 4 to OpenSuSe 11, and my machines have always survived and either worked better or just as well. I tend to use free antivirus - For a long time AVG but these days Avira.

Any thoughts on this subject from some experienced people?

Personally I think you mistaken to assume that what happens to you happpens to "everybody".

[quaxo]

Can't really say I can relate to mgookin.

But Salmon, on the other hand, I relate to almost completely. I have actually had more problems with systems that weren't updated than were.

If you were never, ever going to connect a computer to the internet, and never ever introduce any kind of media to it (through USB, CDs or DVDs, etc.), then you wouldn't need antivirus. However, your only safe "take it with you" output option would be a printer.