Hi. Any opinions on the subject? The URL is http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate. Thanks!

...Nope, other than it seems reasonable to me. As anyone who tries to target multiple browsers can tell you, it's a pain! <g>

From my corporate side, I love it since it now incorporates MS Office fixes as well.

From the Microsoft newsgtoup stuff, I'm guessing that you're talking about the v5 set of update pages ..??? (my Win-98 stuff srill gets redirected to the v4 pages, so I don't see anything 'new') There is also the added feature of needing to go through a bit of verification which is then used to lock out the (alleged) inappropriate use of a "pirated" copy of XP / other Microsoft apps ... This "feature" has already caused many a headache ....


Although Office update has been around for quite a while, I'll note that it never did regress to include Office-97/Outlook-98 <g>

No, I saw it in a box at the bottom of the right pane of the v4 page http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp in IE6 on a PC running Win2KPro that read approximately as follows:

I understand the advantage, especially from the corporate side as mentioned, of the new MS Update service which incorporates the o/s and Office. Howsenever, what if the updates are bogus? - its happened before, then MS has to release patches for the patches, nom seh? I'd rather pass up on the chance to "get enhancements as soon as they are available..." and update manually when I choose to do so. I "regression test" the updates on one machine prior to general deployment. Ok, all I really do is apply the updates and see how it goes.

Resistance is futile (MS=The Borg); I finally gave in to SP2 and all the updates, even MS Anti Spyware beta is really good (just don't set it to automatically block all scripts!). Oh, and you can tame SP2's "Security Center" and other services you'd rather not have running by default with the freeware XP Antispy utility which is awesome (don't disable the automatic updates service, it has to be running even to manually update). Previous paragraph relevant as far as general MS interface vis-a-vis update services; recognize items more suitable for other threads.

And there maybe other reasons for not wanting to update such as conflicts with other software.
And don't forget about the old policy of backing up before updating which is not always an option when using their automatic updates.
It is much to dangerous from my point of view.