The Annoyances of Patch Management
One of the more annoying aspects of having a home network with multiple PCs is the annoyance that is the task of keeping them all updated with the latest patches both for Windows and for their applications.
Most of the commonly used applications seem to need regular patches, e.g. iTunes, J River Media Center, Adobe Acrobat.
The Windows patches are generally handled thru WSUS (Windows Server Update Service) running on our Small Business Server 2008 server, but even those require approval of patches and often patches require a PC to be restarted or make a PC slow down while they are installed.
On the server itself, patches often requires a restart– a 10-15 minute process best done late at night that requires restarting a few applications that don’t run as services.
In general the patching process should be far less intrusive than it currently is and require far less time.
