5 responses to “MS-DEFCON 4: Apply all outstanding Microsoft patches”

1. 

   J August 12th, 2012 at 18:23

   Woody, do we have to uninstall the FixIt (if we took your advice earlier) before running MS 12-043?

2. 

   Mark Cauffman August 13th, 2012 at 00:09

   You talk about patches as MS12-123. The patches are numbered KB123456 on my update. How do I correlate these two numbers?

   Thanks

   Mark

3. 

   sanda August 13th, 2012 at 18:37

   Just reinforcing how much I rely on the little warning box and the OK now advice. Am sure I’m not the only one. Thanks. It is even more crucial now with Win 7. (“I’ll worry about Win 8 later”….said Scarlett O’. Maybe she said,”tomorrow”.) Am feeling smiley because so far, after putting in the new patches, the machine is working…

4. 

   woody August 13th, 2012 at 23:24

   @Mark -

   It’s difficult. One Security Bulletin (MS12-123) can correspond to many, many KB articles. Typically there’s one KB article for each major product that’s affected – say one for WinXP, one for Vista, one for Win7, and so on.

   One of the reasons why I prefer to offer “all or nothing” advice is so you don’t have to hassle with all of the KB numbers. At this point, I’m advising people to go ahead and apply all of the outstanding patches. The downside of doing that, of course, is that I may hold up an entire month’s worth of patches if there’s one particularly lousy one in the bunch.

5. 

   woody August 13th, 2012 at 23:25

   @J -

   Nope. The patch should install right over whatever was done with the Fixit. No need to uninstall the Fixit.