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 […]

ISSUE 22.35.1 • 2025-09-04 By Susan Bradley Despite the headlines and my caution last week about lowering the MS-DEFCON level too far, another wave of patches is right around the corner. Accordingly, I’m raising the MS-DEFCON level to 2. This is not different from any other month’s recommendation — I always suggest deferring patches before […]

As a follow up to yesterday’s alert to clarify something I’ve seen referred to in the forums, Microsoft released an out-of-band update for Windows 11 23H2 on August 18, KB5066189. This update does not fix the SSD issue I referred to yesterday. Furthermore, I do not feel that this update is important if you already […]

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 […]

PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley For decades, the one constant of a crashing Windows PC has been that telltale blue screen. Windows 11 24H2 gets a revamped BSOD. Thankfully, they’ve become rarer. At the same time, they are strangely visible. I’ve walked by digital kiosks in shopping malls and airport signs hung at a BSOD. […]