PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley September may be back-to-school for many students, but I’m back to testing Microsoft updates. As usual, my eyes and ears (in fact, all my senses) are glued to the latest patching news, reports, social media posts — all my sources — looking for the tiniest hint of trouble. You know, […]

I often recommend updating your firmware to the latest before installing a feature release. But if you have ever followed my patching advice you will know that I stay away from betas, pre-release, and all other “bleeding edge” sort of software. I mean, the release software is buggy enough. Do we need to purposely choose […]

By Susan Bradley Be very careful with updates this month. KB5063878, an August 12 “routine” security update for Windows 11 24H2, seems to have sparked a potentially serious problem. I’ll get into that in a second, but the key takeaway is that I’m not lowering the MS-DEFCON level to 4 or 5, as I usually […]

Beware of headlines. Windows 11’s Latest Security Update Is Reportedly Causing Several SSD Failures When Writing a Large Number of Files at Once https://cybersecuritynews.com/windows-11-24h2-security-update/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2025/08/17/windows-11-latest-update-more-critical-issues-now-emerging-report-claims/ I’ve seen these reports of SSD failures after the August updates for Windows 11 24H2. But I am not seeing them in my testing, nor at patchmanagement.org, nor on Reddit’s […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie Prices this year are so chaotic that there is no way to determine trends. There are many possible reasons for this chaos. Uncertainty about global semiconductor manufacturing is a factor. Tariff upheaval no doubt contributes, although I predict this will even out by the time I reprise this article in 2026. […]