Welcome to the new blog and its first post! As things progress, you’ll see the direction will be to offer small business owners some time & money saving tips alongside informational posts about successful website works. This first topic is indicative of a cornerstone of this business’ philosophy: loss prevention.
So here we go…
The Top 1 reason to not go along with the automatic Windows Updates? You guessed it; your computer can CRASH!
Unless you’ve already experienced this problem, you are probably not aware of it. I, as an example, was not aware of the risk until just a few weeks ago when I encountered the Black Screen of Doom on my Toshiba laptop. Note: This is fundamentally and spiritually different than the fabled Blue Screen of Death (a.k.a. the Blue Screen of Gloom in some circles – Doom & Gloom, get it?).
Despite my efforts to start in Safe Mode, Safe Mode for Dummies and even Mondo-Safe Mode, I couldn’t resolve the problem. The symptoms: Upon powering-up, I was able to get as far as entering my Windows (Vista) password. I hit Enter and – BOOM – Black Screen of Doom. Attempted restarts with F12 and F2 interventions did not produce any fruit, and trying to press CTRL>ALT>DELETE>F13 while throwing salt over my shoulder and singing Friends In Low Places didn’t work either.
Turns out the problem was caused by one of the Windows Updates that had been set to automatically download each day at zero-dark-thirty. I was enlightened by the staff at our local computer repair shop, RX Tech, who told me the occurrence of this kind of problem was not rare. The suggestion was to disable the automaticness of the updates, do them manually, and do them only after they have been in que for a few days. This gives the boys at Microsoft some time to send down fixes, or rescind bugs, before you give your computer it’s latest inoculation.
$125 was the cost of learning this lesson. A $40 bench fee, then the rest to do the magic that they do to get things working again.
In the spirit of SafeHouse (we got your back), I pass this information along in hopes you can avoid a similar experience. I was also inspired to do a little research and found that home users can take advantage of no-charge support from Microsoft by calling 1-866-PCSAFETY. Additionally, you can start a free Windows Update support incident request here:
https://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?gprid=6527
SafeHouse Web is on your side!
