I just visited Microsoft’s Windows Update facility for the first time in a while. My one and only Windows PC has been acting up a bit and at such times I like to begin the diagnosis by updating everything. On this occasion there was only one Critical Update and that was to Windows Genuine Advantage. As I’ve been well and truly burnt by WGA before, there’s little chance of me ever again applying anything relating to it that I can avoid.
Having bypassed the WGA update I moved on to look at the non-critical updates. It was at this point that I realised I no longer trust Microsoft to update my computer. There’s an update to the Root Certificates and I’d rather take care of that myself. Media Player is so riddled with DRM that I’m not applying any updates to that either. Updates to it are for the benefit of Sony, not me. Then there’s a Cryptographic update of some kind and applying that is clearly ridiculous. Who wants a closed-source cryptography system, especially one supplied by a company that deployed WGA as a critical update! So there we have it, my Windows boxes will have to remain largely unpatched and I’ll have to try and prevent attacks at the network level instead.
another alternative (windiz): http://windowsupdate.62nds.com/
The main disadvantage with this method is that there would be some delay before the windiz site provide new updates but apart from that it seem pretty good!