We just made it through patch Tuesday on the 8th of this week, and fortunately the results were mild. There were no major vulnerability issues or bugs found in the 49 patches targeting Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft Office 2010 among others. This is a good note for Microsoft, as many of their recent patches have been met with pushback from end users due to bugs and other inconveniences. Most notably, the 1809 Windows 10 feature update was pushed back over a month and still caused issues when it finally released.
More recently, Microsoft has released patches for Japanese users of Office 2010. The patch was aimed to fix bugs including errors in displaying Japanese dates. These patches were quickly met with pushback as Japanese blogs and forums complained how the patches were crashing the programs.
Due to Microsoft’s recent track record with patches, it may make sense for you to delay these patches. It is easy to do this on older systems like Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. You can turn off automatic windows updates on these operating systems by following these steps. There is no direct setting in control panel like this for Windows 10 machines, but there is a work-around. Follow this guide to set your network connection to “metered” to slow down these updates.
By changing these settings, you are protecting yourself from these day-1 updates that have been historically suspect from Microsoft. If you or your business is reliant on your computer’s applications 24/7, this might be a thoughtful preventative measure to ensure you stay up and running.
As always, stay safe out there.
Jake Malony
On behalf of the team at PJ Networks
