Patches and Updates

It is critical to keep your system patched and up to date to prevent unauthorized access and provide maximum stability.

Vendors will usually release patches for their software when a
vulnerability has been discovered. Most product documentation offers a
method to get updates and patches. You should be able to obtain updates from the vendor's web site. Read the manuals or browse the vendor's web site for more information.

Some applications will automatically check for available updates, and
many vendors offer automatic notification of updates via a mailing list.
Look on your vendor's web site for information about automatic
notification. If no mailing list or other automated notification
mechanism is offered you may need to check periodically for updates.

For Windows users, the most important patches can be found at:

http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

Visit this site and click on Product Updates.

The website will scan your machine to determine what updates are
necessary for your system. When the scan is done, select all critical updates and services packs from the list and choose download.

The service will download and install all the updates, just reboot and
you're done! Its that easy. Remember to do this periodically, at least once a month. Later versions of Windows such as Windows 2000 and Windows XP will offer to do this automatically in the background, an option I highly recommend.

That's it!

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