Is Installling Windows Updates a Must?

Have an Asus u45jc laptop. Recently bought a 256 gb ssd drive and had it installed. I installed the utilities and reinstalled windows. I clicked on windows updates and it shows about 150 updates recommended and 9 updates optional. Is installing these updates a must? The reason why I'm hesistant is because I'm worried installing all these updates will make my computer slower.

 

You should install them. Your computer is highly unlikely to slow, except of course while it is installing these updates.

 

Updates are there for your own benefit, other wise MS would not provide them in the first place.

 

Any speed reduction you notice will occur after all the drivers are installed. Windows updates effect should be minimal to nil.
They're good for security reasons and for stability.

I've found installing all the optional updates first (skipping important updates, and hiding unused languages and drivers), then rebooting and next installing all the important updates works best.
If you're picky about it you can skip (uncheck) IE updates until very last, just reboot before installing.

The SSD should be quite an improvement over any HDD.

 

Technically they're not necessary, but if you don't want someone to steal your bank account and credit card information, play around with your personal data, and then finally turn your laptop into a spambot that's sending out 100,000 emails every hour advertising for some porno site or Deposed Nigerian Prince, then you should install them.

 

I'll go against the consensus and disagree here. I have found that some updates including so-called Important Updates have caused issues on a variety of different hardware I have. So if my comp is running fine I leave it alone and just update all the security updates. I have the same approach when it comes to mobo BIOS updates. If it ain't broke or the update doesn't apply to me I skip it.

I now only install Security Updates and read what the Important and Recommended Updates fix before installing them. So I say YES to Security Updates and a maybe to the rest.

 

This, I've personally never had a Windows update break anything, but if you decide you may not want everything, do the security updates at the very least. I avoid installing drivers through Windows update, most show as optional, but a few may show as important.

 

Never had any problems with Windows updates on 7, even the latest kernel update didn't create problems for me. I even install some hotfixes that don't surface on WU but show up on my RSS feed...( Najnoviji)

 

This is one reason unless one wants to loose money and make zombie or botnets for scammers/malware then by all means don't update your windows. Don't come calling for help should you not do at least updates to protect your O/S itself form those damages.

I don't do always auto updates I let windows update tell me what updates are available and then I go to the actual site and see which updates they are and read about them and then locate the updates and download them for offline install and sometimes when reading it there comes updates that it was fixed or superseded by another update. So as anything read what the updates are before downloading them.

Same here I don't get any kinda breakdown as others have mentioned but what I did was auto update and then go to the site and download for offline install for me this works best as I can see what updates are for and just incase there was reports about problem with the update and I will return another time to see if it was fixed. This to me would avoid the pitfalls of getting a bad update. Also drivers should only be check from the manufacture site or support site not windows update as sometime it doesn't get the right or latest one and could ended causing more problem then it was suppose to fix. So advise get your Drivers from Manufacture site the latest or most current and use those not windows update example Intel WIFI from windows doesn't work you need to have Intel based WIFI software to make the wifi card work for me that was how I fixed my looked like wifi but no connections.

 

Yeah that's what I meant to say. That's exactly what I do. :thumbsup:

 

Windows XP was super fast on the hardware that was new when it was released. With all of its updates installed, the same computer will barely run.

Most updates are actually not required. The security updates are recommended, but if you read them, you can see that some are superceded and a whole lot of them don't apply to you either way.

 

I have a T60 ThinkPad running Windows 7. If I begin to apply patches other than security updates the touchpad takes 5 seconds for it to become responsive when coming out of sleep mode. It takes longer to go into and out of sleep mode and certain programs lose audio. So it's not the case for everyone but I have seen it happen to numerous PC's I own that there can be side effects to installing what you perceive to be a fix when it could cause something else to break.