THANK YOU JohnD for the reply. I was very confused as to getting the Service Stack updates ahead of time. I thought that needed to be done first as Sumit's links seemed to imply that (to me.) I appreciate the clarification.
Y'know, this "update" makes me feel as though my machine was hit with 10 Virus', 5 Worms and at least one Trojan Horse! I'm not sure which I'd rather deal with :D
Yes, my external hard drive is a great back up, but it being hardware, that can always fail too. DVDs, thumb drives, etc. not real convenient when updating documents that need to be saved multiple times, but due to this recentupdate debacle*, I'm trying to do the best and what I can. I will look into the Macrium Reflect you recommend. I can't really justify buying expensive cloud services that are over $100 or more per year--not for the type of user I am. I'm sure it
would be worth it for many though.
I believe that this "new and improved" update has turned many machines into expensive paper weights!! I wish we could postpone getting the forced update until MS can fix the issues, but I doubt that will happen. "If if ain't broke, don't fix it" and "KISS" come to mind when thinking about it.
Thank you again. Much appreciated!!!!
*Debacle: a great disaster, a complete failure: fiasco: Windows Update! That about sums it up.