Back in the days when dinosaurs walked the earth, and yours truly was a fledgling systems programmer, we in the IT industry had one simple rule: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”!

This was a common enough piece of advice, however to computer geeks it meant one very particular thing: stability. When we had slaved in teams for months installing, testing, debugging and updating software, and finally reached the stage where everything was working just exactly the way we wanted it….. hands off! Woe betide the poor soul who changed anything.

Which brings me to one of my pet hates – automatic software updates. They are propagating like rabbits, and in my opinion, causing about as much damage as the aforementioned rodents in a cabbage patch.

Virtually every computer system these days will have at least several programs installed on it which will attempt to update themselves, with or without warning, every single time they detect a live internet connection. These programs include the operating system (Windows) itself, your office applications, your antivirus software, music players, software for your digital camera – to name a few.

Why do they do this?

In theory, it’s a fantastic idea. The logic goes something like this: “Our programs are improving all the time, it is natural that our customers want the latest and best available version of our software delivered to them automatically”. In an ideal world, it would be hard to fault this philosophy.

So what’s the problem?

Firstly, I’d like to refer back to the key word I mentioned earlier – stability. Let me put to you a couple of scenarios that we have seen not once, but many times in our workshop over the past couple of years.

Imagine you’ve spent several months setting up your system exactly the way you want it – you’ve removed any unwanted programs and malicious nasties, organized all your files just the way you want them, got your system running like a dream – you click “shutdown”, and the next thing you see is the following message:

Installing update 1 of 38. Do not turn off your computer, it will turn off automatically.

So you go to bed feeling well pleased with yourself, knowing that your system is protected with all the latest security updates and performance enhancements available. The next morning, you turn on your computer, and instead of the familiar Angelina Jolie (or Brad Pitt) wallpaper, all you see is the following:

NTLDR is missing

Or perhaps a pretty blue screen with lots of unintelligible white writing that reminds you of the movie The Matrix. Or maybe your PC just gets as far as the message Loading Windows XP (or Vista, Or 7)…. over, and over, and over….

Congratulations, you’ve just become a victim of a Windows automatic update!

Or how about this one:

You decide one morning at work to forward the latest batch of email jokes to a friend (with the subject line “Last month’s expense report”, of course). You hit the send button, and are presented with a little box containing the following message:

The host ‘mail.nowhere.com’ could not be found. Please verify that you have entered the server name correctly. Account: ‘mail.nowhere.com’, Server: ‘mail.nowhere.com’, Protocol: SMTP, Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Socket Error: 11004, Error Number: 0×800CCC0D

Has your mail server been the victim of an overnight terrorist attack? Possibly. Or it could be that it’s just got a problem.

Another possibility is that your firewall software has just been updated (without your requesting it), and unfortunately, they didn’t get the changes quite right….

The problem is, this is not a perfect world, and occasionally (try not to faint with surprise here) even the biggest and best software companies get it wrong. Do you really want their mistakes automatically delivered to you daily to wreak who knows what havoc on your system?

Now there is one type of automatic update we have no problem with whatsoever. Nearly all antivirus companies deliver virus signature updates automatically – and this is a very good thing. Virus signatures are simply little packets of data used by the antivirus programs to identify potential viruses on your system – and the more often these are updated, the better. However, in recent times, all of the antivirus companies have started delivering not only updates to the signature files, but also the programs that use them, without the customer’s request. This is bad—It leads to the sort of problems seen above.

The second problem that we see with the idea of automatic updates relates to internet usage. Consider that a bunch of Windows updates may be anywhere from a few megabytes to tens of megabytes. Similarly for antivirus software updates. And, as we pointed out before, you may have half a dozen to a dozen or more programs that want to update themselves every time you are on the internet.

We mentioned in our last edition that malware, such as viruses, trojans, etc could make our internet connection appear really slow. Well, now we can add another perpetrator to the list – automatic software updates. When it takes you 15 minutes to open a web page, you may think you have a virus, when in fact it is only the software companies keeping your “best interests” at heart! At the same time as your browser is valiantly attempting to show you the morning’s news, your antivirus, operating system and music player are all hogging the bandwidth in the background, without you even being aware of it. This can all lead to a noticeable degradation for broadband internet users, for those with dial-up or slow wireless access only, it can be crippling!

Then, of course, there is the fact that many internet users are on plans that include a charge per megabyte for traffic (“downloads”). When you get your monthly bill, and wonder how it includes a $25 surcharge when you only sent 8 emails and visited 20 web pages for the month, guess who you can thank?

So what can I do about it?

Well, I seriously doubt we are ever going to see a change of heart on the part of the software companies here. Like it or not, I’d say automatic updates are here to stay. One thing you can do is to be aware of the above. If you suspect that automatic updates to your software may be costing you large amounts in excess usage charges, or slowing down your internet access you may be able to turn the automatic updating off.

Windows can be set to automatically update (Microsoft’s recommended method, not mine, as you may have guessed) or not – at least you are given a choice. Click “Automatic Updates” in the Control Panel to find out more.

Your antivirus software may have the facility to turn off program updates, while still receiving signature updates. Each one is different, so check yours out, or ring their help desk and ask.

Other programs may or may not have the ability to turn off this feature. It’s worth checking out.

Even if the software does not have the facility to turn it off, you may be able to disable the part of it that does the updating in your windows startup, or use your firewall software to block the program from accessing the internet (be aware that this may cause other unwanted side effects with the program, but it’s worth a try)!

The final suggestion we’d like to make is always take regular backups of your system, every week at least, using system restore – so that in the event something does go wrong, you can go back to a previous configuration, and hopefully recover without a lot of pain.

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