What better Valentine's Day gift could there be for a systems administrator than a bouquet of nine long-stemmed Microsoft security patches?

This month's security bulletins from Microsoft include one in an unusual category: 'security feature bypass'.

How the mighty have fallen! Bill Gates, once the most sought after figure in the tech world, now can't buy an interview.

Microsoft is preparing a scheme to automatically push the latest version of Internet Explorer to users' systems. This can be seen as Microsoft following in Google's footsteps, as part of the thinking behind Chrome was to ensure people stay on the current version.

Microsoft's Christmas stocking of security patches isn't quite as well stuffed as we were led to expect. Nevertheless, 19 vulnerabilities have been addressed.

Microsoft has released just four security bulletins this month, and only one of them is rated critical.

Worldwide use of Windows 7 has finally passed that of Windows XP, according to one web tracking company.

  This month's Patch Tuesday saw Microsoft release eight bulletins addressing 23 vulnerabilities. If you run a still-supported version of Windows, there's a patch for you this month.

Patch Tuesday will soon be with us again, and for October Microsoft is cooking up something for most Windows users and administrators. The scoreline is Critical 2, Important 6.

Microsoft has addressed 22 vulnerabilities with 13 security bulletins this month. The good news is that only two of the bulletins are rated critical.