I was reading some blog postings over at Microsoft and some interesting stats were posted about automatic updates:
20% of them were done manually
80% Were automatically installed
Of that 80%, 34% were done via scheduled install, and 46% of them were installed at system shutdown.
The more interesting part is that applications like Office 2007 will be part of the automatic update process, and so will drivers. Yep drivers.
Here is an excerpt from the post
Also for the first time, with Windows Vista, we are using Automatic Updates to help you get drivers that may be missing from your system. While Windows Update has been used to distribute device drivers for some time, with Automatic Updates in Windows Vista, if you choose the recommended setting for Automatic Updates (download and install important and recommended updates), every time that the machine is scanned by Automatic Updates, it will look to see if there are any devices that either donÂt have a device driver installed for them or for which a generic driver was used. If a specific (non-generic) driver is now available, then it will be downloaded and automatically installed. As is the case with Windows XP, if you were using a driver that was known to have problems for a lot of customers, when a better driver is available, Automatic Updates will download the newer driver and automatically replace it.
To me this is a little scary. Drivers in an automatic update? Hmm. Not sure if I like this idea. I have already had my bad experiences with the Windows XP driver updates that were recommended, and later caused blue screen headaches.