Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Updating and Upgrading the
Operating System
The OS is the platform on which everything else sits, so it's important that it be a stable
and reliable platform. (By the way,
platform
isn't just a metaphor we're making up here; it's
a common industry convention.)
Don't confuse upgrading with updating.
Upgrading
refers to replacing your current
OS with a newer or more feature-rich release. For example, if you have Windows XP and
you install Windows 7 to replace it, that's an upgrade. It's also an upgrade if you go from
a more basic to a more advanced version of the same OS, such as from Windows 7 Home
Basic to Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. On the other hand, if you apply a free patch from
the Microsoft that's designed to correct a problem or provide a minor enhancement, that's
an
update
.
Windows and Mac OS X are both
commercial OSs
, which means you pay
for the OS initially (its cost is included in the cost of a new PC), and you
pay for each upgrade. Linux is a free,
open-source
OS. No one may charge
for it, and all updates are also free. However, Linux itself is a somewhat
cryptic and unfriendly command-line OS, like Unix, and most people use
a graphical
shell
on top of it to provide a graphical user interface. A shell
comes packaged with the free OS in a
distribution package
, or
distro
, and
distribution packages can either be free or commercial.
Updating the Operating System
You don't always have to have the most recently released OS version, but you do need a
version that's current enough so that all the software you want to use runs on it. Whatever
version you use, you should make sure all available security updates are applied to it to
avoid problems due to viruses, worms, and other exploits.
Most OSs have an automatic update feature, which relieves users of the burden of
remembering to look for and install updates. However, occasionally an update may cause
a problem on some systems. For example, an update may have an incompatibility with a
certain piece of hardware that you've installed, causing it to stop working; or an update
may cause an older application to crash. For this reason, some network administrators
prefer to keep control of updates themselves on all the PCs they support rather than
enabling individual users to choose to download them or not; therefore, they may disable
automatic updates on individual PCs.
On a Mac, you control the automatic updates via the Software Update dialog box,
shown in Figure 6.8. (Access this from System Preferences on the Dock.) You can specify
an interval at which to check for updates (for example, Weekly) and choose whether to
download updates automatically.
