Is it advisable to install 99 critical updates at the same time?

whs said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

strollin said:

...I don't have to keep going back again and again to get all the updates completed.

I just do my updates while watching TV and go back to it during the commercials. For me, it's no biggie.

No commercials on my TV here in Germany.

Well, I'm cheap and don't use cable TV. Except for a few really obnoxious ones (and, sadly, they are increasing), I actually like commercials; they support the free programming I'm getting (remember, I'm cheap), some are actually entertaining (the recent Foster Farms singing chickens were a stitch), they provide an opportunity to take a break (skip to my loo, snag a snack or drink, attend to M$ updates , etc.), and inform me of new products and services (the latter is actually huge for me).

richnrockville said:

FWIW: on a brand new installation, I always let er rip. All at one time. The biggest gotcha is that ms in it's infinite whatever sometimes uses a pop under to ask you to agree to install some update and it just sits and waits forever.

On the newest updates on my workhorse Toshiba, I always make an image to an external drive so that I can recover if one of ms's updates screws up.

Rich

The "gotcha" for me when I built my machine back in March was, partway in, the update process froze and I couldn't get anything to happen until I deleted what had updated and started over, this time in smaller bites. Not much fun but safer.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

There are almost as many preferences for how to install large numbers of updates as there are people installing them but the one most agree on is to not install them all at once, no more than ten at a time. I've had good luck installing 10-15 at a time. I just start with the bottom (the oldest) 10-15 and work my way up. Any that are unchecked by M$, I leave 'til last.

I didn't realize that they were listed 'old to new' starting from the bottom. I thought it had more to do with kb numbers but just looked at mine & it looks like the numbers are not in any order.

Thanks for all the replies. I was looking at the list of updates windows wants to apply and as noted the KB numbers are not in order, but that may not matter. What worries me is that when I highlight each update the right panel shows the date it was published and those seem to be in random date order. So trying to do them chunks of say 15 at a time, if I started from the bottom working up, they would not be applied in date order and some that were published earlier would be in other chunks.
One could hope that if an update is attempted which has a missing prerequisite it would automatically apply the prereq fist. But it probably just fails. How can I find out why an update failed? Thanks

Just make sure you backup using Macrium (see forum sticky) first in case you screw up!

I "normally" would just do all updates at once unless reinstalling an image due to an update failure in which case I'd do all the earliest ones first, the majority of updates come out on the same day which is on the screen somewhere as you click each one so you can scroll quickly through and find ones of a particular date.