I’m not quite sure how long my laptop was sitting on the shelf, but it was about 2 years. I just didn’t need it because I had one through work. But this weekend, I dusted off my old friend and booted it up. It’s still running Windows XP Pro, so I’m thankful there haven’t been any major shakeups in the OS world over these last two years.
Can you guess how many security updates were recommended to me?
Well, in the first pass, Microsoft recommended 64 patches, mostly security related. Then, after a reboot for one of those patches, there were 44 more. I think this might have been a bug and repeating 44 of the earlier 64, I wasn’t watching closely enough.
After the 64 security fixes, the machine was still not in good shape, and it recommended Windows XP SP2. 110MB downloaded and about 1 hour later, XP-SP2 was running.
Still not done, though, 12 additional critical and major security updates were yet to be installed.
After the end of that (took about 3 hours end-to-end), I’m ready to go!
One last note: After doing all these updates, I found that Microsoft Update keeps track of your patching history. It even still has my history from 2004! So, prior to my patching frenzy today, I last patched the system on June 11, 2004, with KB839643. Today, I installed a total of 127 patches.