You can change your AutoUpdate settings at any time through the System Properties. As an added benefit, the System Properties settings have an additional choice: You can select to have updates downloaded and installed automatically.

Follow these steps to change your AutoUpdate settings:

1. Open the Control Panel > System to open the System Properties dialog box. (Or, open the Start menu, right-click My Computer and select Properties.)
2. Click the Automatic Updates tab.
3. Click the desired option, as shown in Figure 3-1. Or, to turn off automatic updating, clear the checkbox at the top.

Figure 3-1: System Properties Automatic Updates tab.

4. If you select the last option, Automatically download the updates, and install them on the schedule that I specify, select a date interval (such as Every Day) and a time. Click OK.

If you select to have updates automatically installed (Step 4), the computer may need to reboot after an installation. If you're not at the computer to respond to any prompts to save your work, it's supposed to wait for you to save your work in any open data files before it restarts. To be safe, save your work before you get up from the computer.

Install a Downloaded AutoUpdate

Let's assume for the moment that you've decided to go with the default setting for AutoUpdate -- to allow automatic downloading but to be prompted before the installation of an update.

After you've configured AutoUpdate initially, the AutoUpdate icon reappears in the notification area whenever an update is available. At that point, you can ignore the icon until it's convenient to deal with it, or you can double-click it to begin the installation. Figure 3-2 shows an Automatic Update that's ready to install. You can click Details if you're curious what it is, but you should always install the update.

Figure 3-2: An Automatic Update is downloaded and ready for installation.

Some of the updates require you to restart your computer afterwards; others don't. Sometimes if you click Details, it will tell you whether the current update requires a restart. It's useful to know because you might postpone the installation if you're in the middle of something in another application and don't want to restart right away.