You know there's plenty of people out there (frustratingly they're members of the IT community in many cases) who will tell you not to run microsoft automatic updates, and they'll "screw up your machine" and it drives me nuts every time I hear this ignorant statement.

It is pure insanity to run Internet Explorer 6, or 7 when Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3, Safari, Opera and any other browser is out there.  There's a few very good reasons to upgrade and here's some of them:

1. Many pages on the web look like junk in Internet Explorer 6 because clients are increasingly unwilling to pay extra money to web developers to optimise for an obsolete (read VERY obsolete) browser.
2. Web development techniques have run ahead in leaps and bounds since Internet Explorer 6 was released (it can't even display transaprent .png images, and doesn't recognise many javascript, css3 and xhtml techniques) and thus you're seeing websites in a type of campatibility mode developers have used to ensure the website doesn't look like total junk, but it doesn't look as good as it would in a more modern browser.
3. Internet explorer 7 is an unreliable dog of a browser to use, it crashes frequently, loads pages slowly and is insecure
4. Internet explorer 6 has security holes you could fly a 747 through, putting your privacy at risk
5. Tabbed browsing!
6. Standards compliance in Internet Explorer 8 is about as close as Microsoft has every been.

Other things that are massively important with upgrading your operating system.  Currently if you are running windows, right click on "my computer" and click properties, and you see something other than Windows XP Service Pack 3 or Windows Vista Service Pack 2 your computer is not up to date and could (actually does) have many security vulnerabilities, bugs, inefficiencies and errors that have been solved in later service packs.

The simple recommendation from me, UPGRADE, UPDATE, and do it as often as updates come available.  Whether you're running Windows XP, Vista, 7, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Slackware, Mandriva, CentOS, Redhat, Windows Server, it doesn't matter, update, upgrade, NOW, your computer will run smoother and you'll be more secure.