[Fury]

Not very many people seem to be aware that Secunia provides two free tools to scan for software security vulnerabilities. The first tool is OSI (Online Software Inspector), the most basic but also the easiest and quickest one to use. The second is PSI (Personal Software Inspector), an installable application which has more thorough scanning than OSI. There's third version for Corporate use too, CSI.

Both the OSI and PSI are neat little tools to keep your software up-to-date as far as security is concerned. Run either one of them and see for yourself how many software you have installed which have known security vulnerabilities.

Note that some software leave behind files from older versions because another software was using them at the time, causing false alarms from OSI/PSI. One example is Adobe Flash, in most cases these remnants can be safely removed. Both OSI and PSI gives you location of those files you can remove them from.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Nope mine isn't but it will be soon.  I don't let anything auto update.  I make an image of my system then update everything.  Image is stored on my server and backed up to tape.  If anything happens to my computer I only loose what has happened since the last backup.  Since I save almost everything on my server which is also backed up to tape every week a full system failure involves restoring from image and installing any updates and software installed since the last image.  No loss of data. 

Since I try to do this quarterly I'm do to update all systems in about 2 weeks. 

[Nuke]

i think software updates way too much. i will sometimes run an old piece of software if i think its better than a new version (photoshop 7 for example, as cs3 really pisses me off with how slow it is). i hate it when software installs an updater that likes to stay running in the background, as a service maybe (unless its a security thing, like a virus scanner or a firewall). i avoid loosing data by copying it to other hard drives in this computer and to my laptop. really important stuff, like code and models, usually get backed up to my ipod.

[Colonol Dekker]

I only bother backing up my documents, mods and created works. Programs and the OS / drivers/ can always be re-installed.

If any game saves get narked, it just gives me reason to replay it later.

But these tools are very useful regardless of that. Thanks for the link.

[Nuke]

i do keep a cache of drivers on at least two harddrives, especially redistributable service packs (the big ones for it people that you can apply without being connected to a mega porn pipe) and hard to find drivers. when you get about 4 or 5 gb of transfer a month and you have to download something big, like a service pack (or several), you can easily use up a big chunk of that just on a single crash or just a casual reinstall.

if theres one trend in modern computing i seriously hate (aside from what i like to call update hell, where you spend mopre tupe updating things than actually using your computer which kinda should take priority), its got to be the web installer. it prevents you from archiving that installer, so if you install it to all 4 of your computers, you got to download most of it 4 ****ing times! then you cant archive it for the next time you format your system partition either. now for applications that require an internet connection its not so bad, far from acceptable but its not so bad it makes me want to impale puppies. but when you get into something like vc2008 express edition, which is ****ing huge, web installer is probibly the worst thing you could do. at least they provided an iso (a rather large one i think).

anyway long story short, everything sucks!

[Fury]

Must be a record in off-topicness.

[Nuke]

kinda went off on a tangent again, guess i forgot to include this guy