Windows updates..necessity?

Alright I'll try cut this short.

Nope, you dont need to keep up to date with them.

Why?

Your Antivirus + Firewall keeps you defended enough.

But why make security updates?

If you read the descriptions of most of them their very vague and usually fix exploits that are not always about taking out your system or infecting it with loads of junk.

A few suggestions for you, take them if you want just offering my opinion and knowledge.

Take norton off, firstly, it's a massive resource hog, secondly it commonly gets tagged as a "legal virus". It's not doing system much help by taking over a lot of resources.

Replace norton with Microsoft Security Essentials, it's great! Runs quietly (no pop-up's every 5 minutes) and it uses such a tiny amount of RAM that you'd hardly notice difference installing it on a clean machine.

I noticed you didnt mention what OS you where running besides "Windows" so I'm going to asume 7 and suggest you only upgrade as far as 7. 8 is a failure, Vista to XP. Nothing good comes from updating.

yes very important, & we get attracts all time most from over seas, but use Microsoft Security Essentials & keep ur firewall on all the time, after installed full scan it will update then sit in the system tray if a treat try's to get on a pop-up will come up over the clock & say clean computer click it & what ever it was is gone & it's free for life, & those update r very impotent, that's the bad thing that's why I fix mu system by do system restore, but only work when u have made restore points weekly, then u can go back, note set the update to leu know when & when u want to install, I have mind set for 3am I put my computer to sleep & 2 hit on the enter & it wakes, also I found all the updates in 1 file & burn it, so when I do reinstall I put that disc in & it done in a few min. cause some of the old ones r 1GB & 2 large :)

Basically, if you have an internet connection to the computer it is vulnerable to attacks.

The fixes are for bugs and flaws, not for things that work as they are supposed to.

Vulnerabilities to remote attacks are nothing to do with enabling remote access, they are flaws that allow viruses or other exploits to be 'injected' in to the machine by various means such as buffer overflows.

Install ALL windows updates!

And, get a decent antivirus such as NOD32 and also anti-malware / spyware such as Malwarebytes, Superantispyware and Spybot search & destroy.

(At one time, Norton was the best - but it's not been since about 2005 in my opinion).

If you want to minimise space, get 'ccleaner' and run that to remove all the leftovers from installing the updates.

[Electronics designer & programmer, plus commercial system builder for many years].

First, the security updates wold not be needed if turning off remote access stopped attackers.

Second as long as your machine is connected to the Internet it is a networked machine. ALL connections to the internet suffer continuous regular attacks from people trying to gain access toa any machine they can to use to remotely attack more important machines without it tracing back to them, but of course such an attack then traces back to you. Watching log files on public servers I see as many as 2000 such attacks per hour from one script, and as many as 3 times aday from different scripts.

Third, a required update for a region is STILL a weakness in your machine whatever region you are in, if you visit a site with support for that language it may try to load the language pack. If your machine's security handles that, you are fine, if not does not, the security updates will protect you.

Fourth if you are relying on Norton, you are in real trouble.

Really you should not have a problem. I would recommend at least updating everything you can before the first "service pack" without installing that.