I've never known a bit of software get so many fricking updates!!!

I'm running Windows XP at work (soon to switch to Windows 7 yay!) and I run Windows Updates every week just to check.

The OS is now almost 10 years old and still every week there are updates.

I've got 22 updates this week!

Could they not just release a single big update for the whole thing rather than releasing updates drip by drip?!

It's Tuesday so I'm doing mine too. At lest they don't release them every day, but since nearly all of them are described as "A security issue has been identified that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to compromise your system and gain control over it." they do need to release them regularly.

It is quite astounding that there quite so many, but Windows is a bit complicated.

I know a bloke who recently switched off Vista's updates as they were bringing the machine to a standstill. I haven't took XP updates in years...

There is still one update for XP that I refuse to download as it completely grid locks my computer to the point that it is unusable... Windows Search 4.

The worst piece of Microsoft software in existance.

Seriously, if Google can make Google Desktop work so well on Windows then why can't Microsoft do the same thing? It's their own OS after all!

Trouble with the idea of one big update is that they never find all the vulnerabilities at the same time. Consequently you can either put updates out drip-fashion or leave machines vulnerable until the next update. Tbh I prefer the former.

Windows isn't alone in this - every OS is vastly complicated these days and requires constant patching. I'd guess I get about 3 per week on average on Linux.

Oh and as for Windows Search 4 you're correct in that it does suck. However it cannot hold a candle to the monumental fail-horror-carnagefest that was ZMD back in openSUSE 10.1. They had to re-release the entire OS it sucked so bad. *shudder*

I've seen Windows Search 4 fail to install on no less than 3 XP machines. Not sure what's going on there.

I wish that there was one patch, when updating a new computer, to bring it up to the newest patch revision, but they don't do that.

That said, apart from very serious zero day flaws, they patch only on the first Tuesday of every month.

I think there have been about 4 out-of-cycle patches this year.