Attackers rarely need a new trick. They need a computer that missed an update. We make sure yours isn't one of them.
Not out of carelessness. Updates arrive at bad times, they interrupt what you were doing, and "remind me tomorrow" is always the easier button. Meanwhile Windows Update handles Windows and almost nothing else — your browser, your PDF reader, your video conferencing app, the utility that came with your printer, each has its own updater, its own schedule, and its own way of asking. Some ask badly. Some don't ask at all.
So machines drift. Not dramatically — a version behind here, a plugin nobody has thought about in two years there. And that is exactly the surface attackers work on, because a vulnerability that has been public for six months has had six months of tools written for it. They are not hunting for a brand-new flaw in your particular computer. They are scanning for the ones that never got fixed.
Three things happen, in order.
We find out what is actually installed on your computer — including the things you forgot were there.
Not a generic schedule. What gets patched, and when, is set per computer, so updates land at a sensible time rather than in the middle of something.
Windows and your third-party programs are checked against known vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis, and patches are applied without you doing anything.
What you see is a regular recap of what was updated. What you don't see is the part that matters: nothing sitting unpatched for months because a reminder got dismissed.
Plenty of updates don't actually take effect until the computer is restarted, and a machine that never gets rebooted quietly stacks up patches that aren't protecting anything yet. We're alerted when a computer has gone three days without a restart.
From there it's whichever you prefer: a message on your screen asking you to restart when it suits you, or we restart it for you automatically while it's idle and outside the hours you normally work.
Leave it on. It's necessary and it's free. It is also only part of the job.
Windows Update patches Microsoft's software. It has nothing to say about Chrome, Firefox, Adobe Reader, Zoom, Java, or the two dozen other programs on a typical computer — several of which are the exact programs that open files sent to you by strangers. Those are the ones worth patching first, and those are the ones nobody tracks.
Windows Update fails silently more often than people realize — a stalled update, a service turned off by a previous cleanup, a machine that has been asleep every time an update was due. When patching is managed, a computer that has fallen behind shows up as a computer that has fallen behind.
Updates occasionally break things. A driver update that doesn't get along with an old printer, a program that stops launching after a change it didn't expect. It is uncommon, and it is the price of not being the machine with a six-month-old hole in it.
When it does happen, fixing it is hands-on work and it's billed at $125 per hour in 15-minute increments — with 10% off because the computer is enrolled. We'd rather say so here than have it be a surprise.
Software updates are one of the three parts of Total PC Protection, alongside antivirus and 24/7 monitoring. Antivirus and patching belong together for a simple reason: doing either alone leaves the obvious question unanswered.
Setup is one 30-minute remote session. No pressure, no salespeople, no call center.