Microsoft Schedules 8 Patches For Tuesday

[Mobo]

The Redmond, Wash.-based developer will release eight patches for Windows, Office, Exchange, and MSN Messenger, at least half of which will be marked "critical," the company said late Thursday.

The patches will hit on the same day that Microsoft turns off its automatic blocking of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), which many companies applied last summer when the OS revision released.

According to information posted on Microsoft's Security Bulletin Advance Notification Web site, five of the eight fixes will be for Windows, and one each for Office, Exchange, and MSN Messenger.

Due to the fact that these updates will be available for automatic update i recommend that each user manually update to sp2 prior to this day. Therefore the user can create a system restore point between the updates in the event that a problem occurs.

By doing so it will be much easier to diagnose which update if any was the culprit in a misbehaving system should that be the case.