No More Frustration: Understanding Microsoft’s Update Tuesday

You may have heard of the term “Update Tuesday.” It’s used to describe the second Tuesday of every month, when Microsoft releases new patches and security updates for Windows, Office, and other Microsoft products. You may also have heard that Update Tuesday is important for keeping your computer running smoothly and staying secure online.

But what exactly is Update Tuesday and why is it important? First, let’s take a look at what Microsoft is actually doing on this day. Update Tuesday is a regular event where Microsoft releases new patches, updates, and security solutions to protect your computer from the latest threats. This includes bug fixes, security improvements, and other features that help keep your system running smoothly.

The goal of Update Tuesday is to make sure that your computer is always safe and secure. Every month, Microsoft evaluates the latest threats and vulnerabilities and creates patches and updates to keep you safe. By making sure your system is up-to-date, you can avoid falling victim to viruses, malware, and other malicious software.

Update Tuesday is also important for keeping your system running smoothly. New updates often include performance improvements, new features, and bug fixes. If you don’t keep your system updated, you may find that your system runs slower or experiences more frequent crashes.

Finally, Update Tuesday is important for staying current with the latest technology. New updates often include new features and improvements that can help you be more productive and make the most of your computer.

So how do you make sure your system is up-to-date on Update Tuesday? The easiest way is to turn on automatic updates in Windows. This will automatically download and install new patches as soon as they are released. If you’d rather manually check for updates, you can open Windows Update and click “Check for Updates” to see if there are any new patches available.

It’s also important to note that the updates released on Update Tuesday may not be immediately available to all users, as there is typically a delay between when the updates are released and when they become available to you. Some computers may start updating before others because of the time computers are on, when those computers are being used, and other ‘techy’ stuff involving the internet, time zones, and servers.

To help your PC perform these Update Tuesday updates, you might choose to leave your PC on for the night. Because when you close the lid of your laptop, shut your computer down, or allow it to go to sleep, then the automatic updates cannot automatically install. Then your PC is trying to catch up and download the updates the next time you are trying to use it, and it can make your PC super slow. To make sure your PC stays on all night long so that it can perform the updates uninterrupted, follow these steps:

• navigate to “Settings”
• choose “System”
• click on “Power & sleep” on the left hand panel
• change the sleep setting to “Never”. (you can always change it back on Wednesday, or just leave it that way if you wish.)

Often, the last stage for these updates is for your computer to perform a restart. This allows the updates to become active and finalizes the entire process. A restart is different than shutting your PC down and turning it back on again. If you power off your PC and then power it back on, it just goes back to whatever state it was in before you shut it down. So if it was needing to do a restart to finish updates, and you shut it down and turn it back on, it will still need to do that restart.

The single most helpful thing you have control over is to make sure your PC performs a restart when it’s needed. Since you won’t know what time your updates will install, you can plan ahead and perform a restart Tuesday evening right after you are done with your computer, or first thing Wednesday before you start using your computer. To check if your PC wants to do a restart, navigate to “Settings”, choose “Update & Security” and look for a button that says “Restart Now”. If you see the restart button, click it! If the button says “Check for updates” then you are good to go.

The second most helpful thing you can do is to simply check for more updates. Sometimes the message says “all up to date” but really it means “up to date since I last checked”. Whenever your computer finishes updates, it could easily become available for further updates. That’s because a computer will only download updates that it actually needs. If there is a sequence of updates your computer needs, it won’t even acknowledge the subsequent updates until the first one is completely installed. After the first one is done installing, the computer can check for updates and ‘see’ the next one in line. So I recommend clicking the “Check for updates” button anyway and double checking that it’s really all done.

In summary, Microsoft’s Update Tuesday is an important event that happens every month. It helps keep your computer safe and secure by providing the latest security updates and feature updates for Windows. It’s important to enable automatic updates in Windows in order to ensure that you are receiving the latest updates as soon as they become available. If you are experiencing a slow computer or maybe things aren’t working like usual, try an official restart and checking for more updates before anything else.

By the way, if you are serious about keeping your PC up to date and running smoothly, without learning a bunch of techno-babble, so that you can quickly use your computer when you want to, then I invite you to check out The Frustrated PC User’s Survival Guide at https://tuneup.techstrong.info