You certainly need to look carefully at the hardware updates because hardware manufacturers can push updates through Windows Update


>With certain "brand name" systems, there is often enough customization at various levels that I'd see all sorts of weird issues -- usually you need to make sure you get the model-specific drivers and *never* try to install the generic ones that get pushed from Microsoft Update (of course, this tends to happen even if you don't have a "brand name " system -- learned early on that whenever Windows Update wanted to push a driver update, I should tag that update to be hidden, then go look for the updated drivers at the hardware manufacturer's site).