Patching

There are very few Operating Systems that have an adequate patching process for applications. The only two I recommend to someone who is too busy to track all of their installed applications is FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux. Apparently you can do this with RedHat and its offspring, but I've heard about a lot of issues with "dependancy hell."

It should be noted that "dependancy hell" is usually because the SysAdmin has installed packages from different distributions. For example, installing SuSE packages on a RedHat system is asking for trouble. Packages built for a specific RedHat version almost always work, as do packages rebuilt from .src.rpm files. (RedHat and other RPM-based systems are quite a bit nicer once you learn to rollo your own RPM .spec files)

Linux

Using Debian GNU/Linux it's as simple as "apt-get install update && apt-get install upgrade" and all of your installed applications will now be up to date!

FreeBSD

I've created two shell scripts which I've named update, and upgrade. You will need portsnap, portaudit and portupgrade installed to use these:

 #!/bin/sh
 # update
 /usr/local/sbin/portsnap fetch && /usr/local/sbin/portsnap update && pkg_version  -v -l < #EOF
 
 
 #!/bin/sh
 # upgrade
 portaudit -F && portaudit
 portupgrade -a
 #EOF

Windows

Use internet explorer to go to Microsoft update. Let it scan your computer and install all of the high-priority/recommended updates. If you have an issue installing a patch, say for example KB913580, take a look for the log file in C:\Windows for patchname.log. i.e.

C:\WINDOWS\KB913580.log

opened in notepad.exe, at the bottom of the file you will hopefully find a searchable error message or error code.

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Rumour has it that OpenBSD is building a portupgrade-ish tool, and I will surely switch to them at that point, based on their security history.