Not unlike your car whereas the older it gets the more maintenance and TLC it will require. This is the same for any machine running an older operating system. Windows XP machines especially. I get people asking me all the time, why there are always so many updates to be done and this is the reason. When it comes to the internet and the security involved for the various programs to function correctly without bugs that cause the system to freeze, blue screen of death, or cause other malicious software to get installed without your knowledge, this is typically due to the older operating system. Today for example, I worked on two machines, one with XP and one running Vista. They were both updated 2 months ago. The Vista machine did have the automatic updates turned on, but for the security reasons, the XP machine did not. Now however, I have turned on the "Microsoft Updates" as the system is now patched and secure enough for me to "trust microsoft". The machine running XP had about 30 windows updates available whereas the Vista machine had 3. Granted, many of the updates on the XP machine would have been completed if the automatic feature was on, but because of the other security risks, I have always taken extra care when allowing such automatic updates due to being burned one too many times by corrupted updates and/or updates that simply cause the system to crash, resulting in first removing the updates and then reinstalling them manually one by one (using Belarc Advisor for example). So if you really want your system to hum along like a new car and you are currently using windows XP, there is no time like the present to upgrade to what I believe is Microsoft's best operating system yet, Windows 7!
