Driven mad by computer updates?

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2010. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

Are you driven mad by messages telling you to update your computer? My personal bugbear is a message that tells me my updates are installed and I need to reboot my computer. It usually starts telling me this from about my third patient of the morning surgery, and repeatedly throughout the morning despite me telling it to go away.

The next most annoying thing is when I come to give a demonstration in our conference room, to find that the computer needs an hour to update or the latest software that I want to show isn’t on it.

Let’s face it, updates are necessary. Nothing’s perfect, and most software certainly isn’t. Developers put out updates as a way of fixing bugs that they have created (hopefully by accident), fixing security breaches that they hadn’t anticipated and adding new features. Updates to virus checkers and security software are particularly important.

The downside to updates is they can bring new bugs, can take away things you liked or put in features you don’t like. They can also cause overhead problems. In a surgery with 30 or so computers, if each of them calls home at 8am in the morning asking if there are updates, is it any wonder the internet is slow?

Here are some things to discuss with your IT support team.

Can your updates be set to happen at lunchtime rather than first thing? This has the knock-on effect of speeding up the morning switching on of the computer. Alternatively, some software has the ability to update at a random time after coming on, so that not all computers are doing it at once.

Can you encourage your clinical suppliers not to push out updates on a Monday morning, just before one of the busiest sessions of the week?

Some big updates can be downloaded once, either to a central server in the practice or possibly the PCT, and pushed out over a local network rather than each computer using valuable bandwidth. Microsoft updates in particular can be managed centrally. An experienced IT support team can even test-bed the updates on a limited number of machines first, to make sure they don’t do any harm before pushing out to all machines - are yours doing this?

Special software exists that can interrogate all your machines to see what version of key software they have on them. Across a large practice, or if like us you are on a shared network with other practices, this can be very useful for knowing where different machines are up to.

Sometimes there is nothing better than just having a list of all the computers and going around them one by one, or having someone tasked with turning on machines that are used infrequently and letting them update when no one is using them.