How many times have you seen that pop up on your screen telling you to update your operating system? Are you one of those people who quickly clicks off of it, thinking you will do it another day? You are not alone.
Many people do this without realizing how important it is to update your operating system to its latest software. Updating your operating system not only helps update your security and protects against unwanted cyber-attacks, it also fixes any glitches that are in the system that they may not have known of when launching the update.
Below are five reasons you should update your managed operating system.
Better Security
Updates are often rolled out on an operating system in order to make them more secure. Over time, users and experts will find more and more flaws about the operating system you are using and will report it to them to fix.
Once these flaws have been identified, your provider will work to ensure they are fixed as potential hackers could try and use these gaps in the system to take advantage of it for their own benefit.
Fix System Issues
When launching an operating system, the company will have tested it internally and to the best of their ability. This doesn’t mean that it will be completely perfect and glitch-free. With an operating system being used widely, when launching many users will be using it, meaning some small glitches in the system may appear.
The issues aren’t necessarily big—it could be that you aren’t able to close a program, or maybe a program doesn’t load correctly. But if this is something a lot of users see, it’s important for them to fix it and release a patch.
Add New Feature to Your Computer
When launching an operating system, some features may be disabled in the background. This can be true if they weren’t quite ready on launch date, or they wanted to have a launch of something in the future. The best way to get these new features to you is through an operating system update.
These new features may make your everyday use easier and may speed up your productivity. You often see this on mobile phones, as each year Android or Apple will launch new software that enhances the user experience.
To Protect Others
Security updates are not all about protecting just you. If you don’t update your software you are making yourself more susceptible to a cyber attack on your computer.
If in the unfortunate event someone does successfully hack you, then they could compromise information of others on your home or business network. It will be a lot easier for them to get into their computers as they will already be on the network and have gathered data from being on your computer.
By updating your software and having the latest security, this can reduce the chances of this happening, and help protect others around you. It’s always worth asking the people around you to check they are updating their software as they may not realize how important it is.
Better Functionality
Over time we can learn how people interact with an operating system, learning about the things they do and do not like. By understanding the user journey, companies can start to work on their operating system to offer better functionality. It may be that a user gets confused or sees slowdowns when at a certain stage and contact their support team for help.
With this sort of feedback, systems will get upgraded to improve the user journey. This shows that they want to keep improving the system and that they listen to customer feedback.
Overall, there are many reasons you should not instantly dismiss a system update as soon as it pops up. It normally doesn’t take as long as you think but will help protect you once installed. With most operating systems, you can set a timer for when it should update. That way it causes the least disruption.