Lets demonstrate the importance with a personal story of mine:
When I worked in customer service, we had a customer bring his computer in because he had "corrupted file" errors start popping up whenever he would turn on his machine. Corrupted files are cause by a number of things, especially with mishandling of the program that we supported at the time. After a little digging around in safe mode, I noticed he had multiple instances of a specific file in almost every directory. He most surely had a virus. When I researched the virus and cleaned it out I notice his computer hasn't been updated since the day he purchased it. I confronted him about it when he picked up his computer later that day and he simply said,"Some window named Windows Update kept showing up and slowing my computer down so I just hit cancel every time." This response blew my mind.
Keeping your computer up-to-date is one of the most important things. This means program updates, virus definitions, windows update, or even hardware. Take the time to update at LEAST once a month can be a (computer) life saver. I explained to the customer how easy it could have been for him to lose all of his data (or even his entire computer) in a case like this and I firmly believe what I was saying went in one ear and out the other.
