The scheduled windows updater is fine and all, but on a new install of Windows (or Linux for that matter), I don't like letting a machine out to the world until I have all of the latest patches. The problem with the windows update is that it could take weeks just letting it download and install patches as it gets to them, and then rebooting your machine every time it's done, or you have to babysit the thing constantly. We generally use www.windizupdate.com and Firefox to update computers. This is great because windiz will download and install many more fixes before requiring a restart, and it's a lot more automated. Once I've used windiz to get the security updates out of the way I turn on automatic updates to grab any brand new updates from Microsoft, and service packs.