How the Updates Work

Where do the updates come from? You got a hint of that from the previous To Do list if you followed along. When you log on to the Internet, Windows XP, in the background, goes to the Microsoft Web site and looks to see if any updates are required for your particular combination of operating system components. If an update is available, Windows XP either downloads the update at that time and signals you with the taskbar's notification area message, or Windows XP tells you that the updates are available and asks if you want to install them. Windows notifies you in one of these two ways depending on how you set up Windows Update, not unlike the way you changed the settings in the previous To Do steps.