How to tell vista to automatically detect available updates?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael Moser
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Michael Moser

My Vista box shows a (at least to me) somewhat irritating behavior:

When I open Control Panel => Windows Update the dialog appearing at the
top always greets me with "Your Windows is up to date". It does so,
without even checking for new updates.
Only if I manually trigger "Check for updates" it goes off and actually
searches the server for new updates (and e.g. this morning it brought up
10 new updates available!).

Can't one tell this stupid dialog to FIRST go and check for updates and
THEN tell me whether everything's up to date or not? I might be old
fashioned, but I still expect, that a message that some system dialog
displays to me, is the truth and not some fantasy, especially when it
comes to system security! And so I find it most irritating that some
dialog tells me "everything is fine and dandy" each time (and if I would
actually believe it I might feel fine and comfortable in my false
safety) but that I always need to explicitly ignore that displayed
message and manually tell Windows Update to first do its job. Why
doesn't that dialog automatically check for available updates in the
first place?

Just in case: I have configured Windows update to "check for updates
automatically but let me decide, when to download and install them".

Michael
 
My Vista box shows a (at least to me) somewhat irritating behavior:

When I open Control Panel => Windows Update the dialog appearing at the
top always greets me with "Your Windows is up to date". It does so,
without even checking for new updates.
Click to expand...

Spend just a few of your precious free moments to read a tad further
and you will see when it last checked for updates. It's usually less
than 24 hours ago.

That said... see if you can remember this: "Patch Tuesday" is the day
to expect updates. It's the second Tuesday of every month.

Don't bother checking at other times or you're gonna just get annoyed
again.
Only if I manually trigger "Check for updates" it goes off and actually
searches the server for new updates (and e.g. this morning it brought up
10 new updates available!).

Can't one tell this stupid dialog to FIRST go and check for updates and
THEN tell me whether everything's up to date or not? I might be old
fashioned, but I still expect, that a message that some system dialog
displays to me, is the truth and not some fantasy, especially when it
comes to system security! And so I find it most irritating that some
dialog tells me "everything is fine and dandy" each time (and if I would
actually believe it I might feel fine and comfortable in my false
safety) but that I always need to explicitly ignore that displayed
message and manually tell Windows Update to first do its job. Why
doesn't that dialog automatically check for available updates in the
first place?

Just in case: I have configured Windows update to "check for updates
automatically but let me decide, when to download and install them".

Michael
Click to expand...

DDW
 
It probably checked when your machine was turned on, mine does, and I had
the 10 updates it had found.
It was patch day yesterday and several updates were made available which it
obviously found your machine needed when you turned on.
I have my machine set for automatic on this Vista machine and it has always
done a check showing the time round about when it gets switched on in a
morning, and it's then set to install at a certain time when I know the
machine is on and I'm not using it.
If you look in your update history you'll find when updates were installed
most days it's probably ones for Windows Defender which gets regular
updates.
 
DDW said:
...
Spend just a few of your precious free moments to read a tad further
and you will see when it last checked for updates. It's usually less
than 24 hours ago.
Click to expand...

yes - I can see that. But I would expect that the dialog would then
read: "Checking for new updates" or "Check pending..." or something of
that sort while it hasn't been able to contact the server, yet.

Right now this works such, that I boot, I get a yellow security icon in
the taskbar, I click it to see why, the dialog opens and I can read:
"Your system is up to date". ??? So what's the fuzz then? Why is this
icon then yellow?

If I weren't smarter meanwhile knowing that this dialog lies at me, I
would now close the dialog again and think everything's fine - but it
isn't!

Only in the small print you pointed to one can read that the last update
check was actually yesterday (or even earlier) and that it apparently
hasn't even tried to check again since and that I need to manually
trigger an update check even though I have set it to do that
automatically. The point I am trying to make here is: the update check
shoud not just change the icon's color but also change the label's text
appropriately!

Michael
 
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