This Week in IT – Is Microsoft Killing Off Patch Tuesday?

This week in IT, Russell Smith examines whether Microsoft Autopatch could kill off Patch Tuesday for some businesses. Plus, Remote Help is now generally available, and yes, it’s expensive. Windows 10 November 2021 is ready for broad deployment. Microsoft is planning to disable SMB v1 in an upcoming Windows 11 release. Exchange Server cumulative updates are going biannual. And in this week’s hot tip, learn how to block out time for task items on your Calendar in Outlook. And I look at the most interesting new how-to articles on Petri this week.

About This Week in IT

This week in IT is a weekly podcast hosted by Petri’s Editorial Director Russell Smith. Each week, Russell rounds up the most important stories for IT pros in a short video.

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Conversation 19 comments

  • George Coll

    Premium Member
    22 April, 2022 - 4:23 pm

    <p>Thurrott Members, We encourage you to check out Russell’s weekly, "This Week in IT". Your support on Petri is appreciated and helps all of us at Thurrott and BWW Media Group! </p><p><br></p><p>Russell has been a part of the family for a really long time and took over Brad’s role last fall. This weekly newsletter is fun to check out. </p><p><br></p><p>Thank you!</p>

    • miamimauler

      23 April, 2022 - 4:03 am

      <p>@George Coll</p><p><br></p><p>I am fully aware this won’t be popular but I must make a point or two.</p><p><br></p><p>We already have Thurrott.com shilling for Brad Sam’s Startdock without displaying a disclaimer which is highly unprofessional at best and deceptive at worst.</p><p>Now we have you shilling for a Petri product. Did you ask Russell how he feels about this? I ask that question as if I were Russell this would be embarrassing for me.</p><p><br></p><p>Paul and Brad…or is it Brad and Paul. You guys need to work this out and draw some boundaries.</p><p><br></p><p>Just my opinion guys, take it for what it’s worth…which is nothing.</p>

      • Paul Thurrott

        Premium Member
        23 April, 2022 - 10:00 am

        What a shitty, shitty thing to write.

        I am not "shilling" for Brad or Stardock. I wrote about Stardock’s products long before Brad joined the company, and I continue to do so for the same reason: They are useful and offer a tremendous value. And for whatever it’s worth, I had to find out about the latest Start11 release from my RSS feed; Brad never even mentioned it to me. We’re not joined at the hip.

        With regards to Russell and Petri, we’re all the same company. The same very small company struggling to survive in this economic nightmare. We discussed this particular video internally and I agreed that readers here might enjoy it and should be exposed more to Russell who, unlike some, is good people.

        Awful. Just awful.

        • lwetzel

          Premium Member
          23 April, 2022 - 12:33 pm

          <p>Paul, I think you are dead on. What a world we have today. Too much!</p>

        • bschnatt

          23 April, 2022 - 4:21 pm

          <p>Thank God miamimauler came along. Finally! Someone you probably like less than me, LOL</p>

        • ronh

          Premium Member
          24 April, 2022 - 11:44 am

          <p>Hey Paul.</p><p><br></p><p>I love the work you and your team do. With Brad, MJ, Leo, Raf… </p><p><br></p><p>Keep doing it. </p>

      • christianwilson

        Premium Member
        23 April, 2022 - 11:31 am

        <p>The cross promotion of Petri content makes sense and I’m surprised it hasn’t been done more in the past. It’s not a partnership with Petri. We’re talking about the same publishing company. I’ve always seen Petri as the IT/Pro resource and Thurrott as the consumer resource. Many of us here are IT pros who also have an interest in consumer tech.</p><p><br></p><p>This post was useful to me. </p>

      • navarac

        23 April, 2022 - 2:27 pm

        <p>Out of order, "miamimauler". Petri and Thurrott are part of BWW. No "shilling" involved.</p>

      • whiplash55

        Premium Member
        23 April, 2022 - 4:58 pm

        <p>Been listening to WW since it started, Thurrott might be a few things, but a shill? I remember him mentioning Start 8 years ago to replace the start button in Windows 8, and the free alternative I can’t remember the name of.(Classic Shell) I used both of them, eventually buying Start 8, and Start 10. So is he a shill for xbox and MSFT, hardly but he talks about them every week almost. </p>

      • brettscoast

        Premium Member
        25 April, 2022 - 10:03 pm

        <p>You are completely out of order mate Paul isn’t shilling for anyone, your comments are ill-informed and completely unhelpful. </p>

  • matsan

    23 April, 2022 - 12:08 am

    <p>Automatically rolling out patches – what could possibly go wrong with that? ?</p>

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    23 April, 2022 - 2:08 am

    <p>What does Microsoft do with the ~30% of PCs and servers where the updates fail to install properly?</p><p><br></p><p>I’m now having to manually install updates on many servers and PCs, because Windows says there are no patches to install, yet the WSUS server says they have outstanding patches (the devices show last patch was December, yet no new patches available (January, February, March updates all approved on WSUS and WSUS says they need to be installed on those machines), I end up downloading the updates manually from the Microsoft Update Catalogue and install them manually.</p><p><br></p><p>That also means the servers can’t be set to auto-reboot outside of operational hours, so I have to manually reboot them at night or at the weekend.</p>

    • ralfred

      Premium Member
      24 April, 2022 - 2:29 am

      <p>Sounds like your setup is not functioning correctly </p>

      • wright_is

        Premium Member
        24 April, 2022 - 2:05 pm

        <p>It has been working fine for 3 years, but some servers and PCs stopped taking updates in December. Seems fairly random as well, 2012, 2016 and 2019 servers and W10 20h2, 21h1 and 21h2, but only small numbers of each, not all of them.</p>

  • Piyer

    23 April, 2022 - 9:32 pm

    <p>Thank you for exposing This week in IT!. I had a chance to view it, which I would not have done it without the article. I like the quick digest and also the segmentation bar which, allows me to skip subjects may not be of interest to me. </p>

  • harmjr

    Premium Member
    24 April, 2022 - 12:26 am

    <p>I like this. I say Post more. </p>

  • luisharp

    24 April, 2022 - 6:40 am

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Awful. Just awful.</span></p>

  • rmlounsbury

    Premium Member
    25 April, 2022 - 11:40 am

    <p>As an IT Pro I follow Petri and am fine seeing Petri content on Thurrott.com. It’s all the same realm when it comes to Windows. </p><p><br></p><p>As far as the auto-patching goes with Microsoft and their AI tool… Unless they want to roll this out at no charge then Patch Tuesday is not going anywhere. Because Microsoft Autopatch is prohibitively expensive for SMB’s. </p>

  • compuser

    25 April, 2022 - 1:32 pm

    <p>I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure they’ve done this at least once before in favor of releasing patches/fixes as needed. It didn’t take long for Patch Tuesday to come back.</p>

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