Everyone has experienced it. Trying to get out of the office for the day, needing to make an important call or just wanting to use their device but being stymied by … updates. Regardless of your device of choice, updates are a regular occurrence of technological life. What are all these updates and why do you need them?
Simply put, updates are intended to be improvements in software. We say “intended” because sometimes updates have unintended consequences, causing more harm than good. For the most part, however, updates are an effective way to keep everything running smoothly.
What’s in an update? The big stick is security. As exploits and weaknesses are discovered, updates to plug those holes are released. This is mostly true for operating system updates such as Windows and IOS, but software applications also can be affected.
Besides security, bug fixes are included in most updates. Sometimes these are well-known, high-profile bugs, but they often are smaller malfunctions that get collected over time and fixed on a regular basis.
New features also are included in updates, sometimes to mixed reviews.
In the days before the ubiquity of high-speed internet access, updates were shipped out on CDs, tape, floppy disk or some other type of physical media. The user (or his/her information technology staff) controlled when updates were applied. Nowadays, however, updates come out over the wire, although for larger organizations there are methods for IT folks to control updates to computers.
The “always on, always connected” nature of smartphones, however, contributes to the increased frequency of updates on those devices. Significant updates come with a warning, but many folks often underestimate the time needed for completion.
For virtually every type of device, there are ways to stop updates from being automatically applied. This, however, is a bad idea. Sure, there have been well-publicized instances of “updates gone bad” with unexpected consequences, but these are few and far between.
If you ever run into a problem and call for technical support, one of the first things you will be told is to apply all recent updates. This is for good reason and not just a “pile of rocks” exercise.
(For the unfamiliar, the pile of rocks exercise is used when tech support really doesn’t have an answer. They tell you do something akin to moving a pile of rocks from one spot to another. When you report back that you have moved the pile of rocks, you will then be told to move the pile of rocks back to their original location, thereby buying time for the techs to figure out the problem and discouraging you from pursing the matter.)
If all updates are applied, it is easier to troubleshoot a problem as it puts your device in a known state. If you have different versions of software than the person trying to help you, re-creating and thus identifying the problem is nearly impossible. And, given that updates often include bug fixes, this is a natural first step anyway.
If you regularly apply updates, then you will be that much further ahead if you ever run into an issue. If possible, be conservative when applying updates — for example, don’t be the first one on the block to try the latest update. Give it a few days and see what happens to the other kids before jumping in yourself.
John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at jagsalud@live.com.
