That is the question. It is often asked about everything from Windows Updates to iPhone firmware updates.

Most large corporations don’t use Windows Update on individual machines, instead they make use of automated patch management, sometimes using a software tools like Software Update Services (SUS). This way updates are applied to test machines before being rolled out to a corporations Windows Desktops. The book “Curing The Patch Management Headache” covers this.

What about home users? If you are fortunate enough to have more than one machine, you can apply Windows updates to the least important machine first, and then to the other machine(s) after a few days. Of course this is assuming you are not running a desktop with Windows XP and a notebook with Windows Vista. The Windows version needs to be the same to do this, and in some case the processor – Windows XP Service Pack 3 initially had a bug that only affected machines with AMD processors. Sometimes though, if the patch is a critical security patch, it is better to apply it rather than wait.

Naturally that brings me to iPhone firmware updates and iTunes updates. To update an iPhone to version 2.1, version 8 of iTunes is required. The first iTunes version 8 for Windows caused machines running Windows Vista to crash. Apple had a fixed version available quite quickly. As for the iPhone firmware update, it is supposedly to fix a lot of problems. User feedback is mixed, so I think I may wait for a while…

Posted on September 14th, 2008 by mervyn