inluminent

I sent an email to my company’s IT department Tuesday. It said:

The little “windows update” icon popped up in my system tray today, and I learned that XP SP2 is now available to me as an update. Do you want me to install the update?

I asked them about this particular update, because I’ve read a few bad things about the update, and don’t really care to investigate them myself. I usually just install whatever security updates Microsoft provides (for IE and the other ‘critical’ updates that have come out over the past 2 years since I got the Dell laptop that is my work computer). I also asked because I hadn’t heard anything pro or con from the IT department about the update, and since they gave me “administrator” powers on the machine, I wanted to know if they wanted me to install the update or not, because I don’t want to hear “you should have asked us” when the update breaks something that’s important to my daily work tasks.

(Most of the PCs in the company are pretty locked down and require an IT person to install anything, but I got lucky and got admin priviledges on my machine for some reason — and about 1/2 the company uses Macs, so our PC IT department is pretty small and over-worked … though come to think of it, there are actually more PC IT folks than Mac IT folks… says something doesn’t it? But I digress…)

I got a priceless response from a usually generally overly-helpful, normally cordial, and usually explanatory staff:

NO

That was the entire response. ALL CAPS. One word. No explanation.

So, I went about my day, and won’t install XP SP2, but I can’t help but think about how crappy the job Microsoft is doing at educating their corporate clients about this update (which is supposed to solve a lot of security problems isn’t it?)

Oh well, glad I use a Mac at home and don’t have to research that update for my own personal use…