The question: for a small nonprofit with five or six desktops and nobody whose job is IT, is it safe to let Windows Update run on its own schedule, or does someone need to be in charge of it? I consult for a few of these places and I have a lean, but I would like to hear where others have landed.
My lean is yes, let it run, with a few guardrails. The risk of an unpatched machine sitting on a desk for six months is bigger than the risk of a bad update breaking a desktop. I have seen both. The unpatched one is the more common story, and it usually ends worse.
The guardrails I would set up, none of them expensive:
- Set active hours so a restart does not land in the middle of someone's grant report. Restarts that never happen are the real patching failure, so don't postpone them forever.
- Make sure the machines are on Pro, not Home, so you can defer feature updates and still take security updates. I would check the exact options on your own build, since the menus move around.
- Turn on System Restore or at least confirm there is a recent backup. Updates rarely break things, but when one does, you want a way back.
- Pick one machine, the least critical one, and let it update a few days before the others if you can manage that. Not a formal ring, just a canary.
- Once a month, someone spends ten minutes checking each machine's update history. Write the result down.
That last step is where it falls apart. Automatic updating without anyone looking is like a sump pump nobody tests. It works fine until the day it doesn't.
What I haven't settled is who owns the ten-minute check when the organization has no staff for it. A volunteer? The office manager? And do any of you use a free or cheap tool for seeing update status across a handful of machines, or is a paper checklist honestly enough? I haven't found a tool at this size that costs less in attention than it saves.
Dwayne