It’s another Patch Tuesday, which these days matters less and less, given that software makers are increasingly forcing updates onto us.

There are still plenty of people running Windows 7 and Windows 8.x: almost 20%, with Windows 10 taking the rest, at close to 80%. That’s according to Statcounter.

Sadly for Windows 7 users, official patches for that O/S are few and far between, with Microsoft only releasing Windows 7 updates to the general public when the vulnerability being addressed is particularly nasty.

That leaves Windows 8.1, for which we continue to receive updates, and for which the process has not changed much since the O/S was introduced in 2013.

The updates

This month, Microsoft is making available updates that address a total of eighty-seven security vulnerabilities in .NET, Office, Edge, SharePoint, Visual Studio, and Windows. That count is based on my interpretation of the official Security Update Guide, and it may differ from totals provided by others, because counting these things is not as simple as it sounds.

If you’re running Windows 10, hold onto your britches as Microsoft installs the new updates remotely on your computer, and hopefully doesn’t break anything this time.

Windows 8.1 users can either enable automatic updates, or head to the Control Panel and fire up Windows Update.

Windows 7 and XP users are basically out of luck. If you are using those systems, I strongly recommend that you don’t also use them for email or web browsing.