Patch management of the most popular operational systems

Patch management is an essential part of the functionality of many operation systems. If you are looking for more information on it regarding the most up-to-date systems such as Linux, macOS and Windows 10, this article will provide you with all of the information you need to know.

Patch management on macOS and Linux

With these two operating system, whenever there will be an update, you will immediately be reminded of the update. You can get access to the update via the apple app store pane right in the system preferences. As for the desktop type Linux distros. You have a GUI updating tool like one of the software updater in Ubuntu, one of the popular Linux distro. With both of these OS, you will have the button to install these updates without any hassle.

Patch management on Windows 10

And now, for the Windows 10, you do not need to manually or set to the automatic process, to download and install your updates. With Windows 10, the system downloads and installs your updates automatically. Windows 10 does not give you an option to select the most necessary updates but leaves you with some optional updates. To manually check for Windows 10 update or optional updates, go to the settings and look for Windows update or you can simply type ‘Windows update’ in the search bar in the task bar.

Some of the major changes are noticed in Windows 10. You won’t be able to turn off updates. You can pause the update for a certain period of time typically, 35 days and you will be reminded to update again. You cannot hide it or skip it in any way. In some cases. It will simply reboot the PC to install the updates. Don’t worry, of course you have control over when Windows reboot by itself to install the updates. You just set the active hours to prevent Windows from any update, yet, you should remember it will reboot outside of active hours. Imagine what potential catastrophe it would have been if they did not allow to change your active hours. This control  can be found in the same page of Windows update in the settings.

Another major changes are brought here by eradicating the three update options that Windows had with Windows 7 and 8. Instead of being referred to as quality updates and the classic patch, they are now called cumulative.  One of the thing to keep track of, in case you are curios, there will be two major updates twice a year for latest version of Windows. One to notice will arrive in the spring and another will arrive in the fall.

Note that these major updates are the reinstall of the Windows. No worries, your files and folders will not be wiped out just newest updates will get installed by a complete reinstall.

Managing temporary files

So what are these temporary files? Temporary files are something that whenever we are browsing the Internet, a lot of these Internet files are cached or store in the temporary zone to give you rich user experience typically. These over time add up to your space and as well as every time you are deleting something that will add up too in the recycle bin.

The best thing to do is periodically running a tool like Disk Cleanup. All of the modern Windows version you will have a feature called storage sense to manage all of these for you. Nonetheless, you still have all of your old tools available at your disposal.

The way you would do it is to access your HDD or SSD in the file explorer. Right click, select properties and look for disk cleanup somewhere in the bottom part of the box and hit it. From there you can select what kind of files you want to clean up and be sure you know what you are cleaning up. In case if you do not understand any option and what they do, simply google. Cleaning up these will give you some good amount of space for your hard disks.

If you scroll down to the bottom, you will find a choice to compress your old files. The fun fact is, compressing these files are really how disk clean up, you know, cleaning up. This is where you get some space for your system. Temporary Internet files will be straight deleted. Remember some of the cached files, a thumbnail, for instance, deleting them, Windows have to rebuild them again, so it is not worth it.