Windows needs to restart your computer to finish installing critical updates.
OneCare will restart your computer in 1 hour 56 minutes.
There is a new Adobe Flash update ready to install. Continue?
HP Software Update. Java version 6 update 3. Acrobat 8.1. Updates are available for QuickenQuickbooksGoogleToolbarAnyDVDMediaCenterLogitechSetpointWindowsMessengerWindowsMobileSkypeNeroUTorrent. And on and on and on and on.
You don’t know what’s safe to install. I can’t keep up. Vista adds an extra click so it’s obvious that a change is being made to the computer, but that doesn’t help if these are coming too fast to understand. Instead people carry away the impression that Vista’s “User Account Control” is intrusive because all they want to do is agree as quickly as possible with whatever comes up on screen.
Our best protection against the bad guys is our common sense. If we are so fed up with a barrage of updates that we click OK without understanding or thinking, we have lost our most important level of security.
And I’m fed up. I’ll bet you are too.
There’s no answer and no end in sight. The best we can do is slow down before clicking the OK button. In the end we have to trust these companies to have our best interests at heart and not use an update as an excuse to become more intrusive. If you’re not completely positive about that, don’t click OK.
And for those of you restarting your computer today after getting an update to OneCare – it’s a bug fix, nothing more. Under some conditions OneCare was using up too many CPU cycles. Now it won’t.
Sigh.
