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Resuming Work Underscores Routine Windows Admin Workload

Hello again! I’ve been quiet for almost two weeks, off on vacation. When I got back to the office yesterday, I found a plethora of Win10 updates and upgrades pending. Right now, I’m running 9 PCs in my office, so resuming work underscores routine Windows admin workload for sure. The mix of OS versions looks like this:

  • 2x 20H2 Insider Preview PCs (Dell XPS 2720 and Lenovo X220 Tablet)
  • 1x 19H2 Insider Preview PCs (Surface Pro 3)
  • 6x 1903/May 2019 Update PCs (3 homebrew desktops, Lenovo X380, Carbon Extreme and T520 laptops)

Upon my return to the grind, I had work to do on all those PCs to catch them up with the leading (and in some cases, bleeding) edge of Windows releases. Here’s a listing from David Xanatos’ outstanding Windows Update Manager that shows new updates for my production PC, for example:

New items show red boxes around July 11, 2019. MSRT shows a typical Patch Tuesday update.
[Click image for full-sized view.]

Why Say Resuming Work Underscores Routine Windows Admin Workload?

It’s easy to stay on top of Windows updates and upkeep on a day-in, day-out basis. But when you have to step away for a while, the level of time and effort involved in such work makes itself felt. So it was for me, who left the office on June 30 and didn’t get back into harness until the afternoon of June 11. A hiatus of 12 days doesn’t seem or sound like much, but it took me a good two hours to step around or remote into the stable of machines at the office and make sure everything was up-to-date and working properly. Indeed, it’s good to be back, but I didn’t really feel like I was fully present until I’d worked through catch-up on all those PCs. And so it goes for most of us, here in Windows World!

This is the first post from me for July 2019. My contract with TechTarget specifies 12 posts a month for this blog. With 12 days gone, and 11 posts to go, that means 3-4 posts a week from me for the rest of July. Consider this fair warning that after my absence and quiet, I’ll be something of a chatterbox (bot?) for the rest of the month!

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