Digital Home Thoughts: Get Ready for Patch Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday, and ...

"The average Microsoft Windows user has software from 22 vendors on her PC, and needs to install a new security update roughly every five days in order to use these programs safely, according to an insightful new study released this week. The figures come from security research firm Secunia, which looked at data gathered from more than two million users of its free Personal Software Inspector tool."

Having half a dozen computers with a cornucopia of software installed on them makes the result of Secunia's study really hit home. There is rarely a day, let alone five, that I do not have to update this program or that. After much thought and cursing and clicking "next" five thousand times, I have come to the resolution that it is not so much that updates are not unified, but the frequency of them. Yes, a unified update manager (like what Linux distributions like Ubuntu do for most programs) is really handy and useful, but it is the frequency of these updates that bother me. In using my computers for work, each update breaks my workflow, and it makes me understand why Microsoft was pushed to do their updates once a month with certain exceptions. Unfortunately, I do not see a way around this. It is the nature of the beast. Even with a centralized update manager, I would still be facing updates every other day from one program or another. Anyone have a solution that minimizes the disruption updates cause?