Six of the best heading your way on Patch Tuesday

Stephen Withers
Friday, 06 November 2009 01:31

Business IT - Security

What's coming up on November's Patch Tuesday? Six bulletins, three of them critical. And according to Microsoft's advance notice, there's a critical bulletin for every supported version of Windows except Windows 7.

System administrators planning to take a holiday on Veterans Day or Remembrance Day might be relieved to learn that Microsoft won't be delivering a bumper bundle of updates on Patch Tuesday, though half a dozen does mean a fair amount of testing and installation work.

Microsoft has pre-announced four security bulletins for Windows this month, and three are critical on at least one version of the operating system.

The first affects Vista and Server 2008 (critical on both), the second is for Windows 2000 only, and the third is for all versions except Windows 7 (critical on Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003; important on Vista and Server 2008).

The fourth bulletin is the only one that has a maximum rating of important. It affects Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

All three bulletins relating to Server 2008 are relevant to Server Core installations.

All of the Windows patches will require a restart, according to Microsoft officials.

What software is affected by the other two bulletins? See page 2.