Actually, the nature of these responses is giving me an excellent clue. Most replies are theorizing about why others don't update. As Karyn mentioned, many people come here only if they have problems, so they might not even know there's an update available. Then when they come here and say "I'm having this problem with X3b" they find out there's a newer version.

Yup an auto update in Sonar would be a nice option. Of course again if you are offline...

We get lots of problems with people who are offline unfortunately, generally because windows update has not been run or drivers out of date.

An interesting related note.... My PreSonus audio interface (in my sig) was recently declared End Of Life by PreSonus. They will not update the driver to Win8. Though I'm told it works with the Win7 driver.

When asked what we should do when we need to upgrade to Win9 or 10 or whatever, the official line was "It works perfectly in Win7, keep your PC as it is..."

So, when Sonar no longer supports Win7, just as XP is not officially supported, I will have no choice but to stop upgrading Sonar. Either that or throw out all the expensive hardware in my studio and replace with... Well there isn't anything on the market that does what my system does. Not even presonus makes a replacement.

Thanks for reminding me, My signature still said 8.5. 
 
And I'll put my hand in the air and declare that my DAW is always offline once it's been built and up and running smoothly. First there is no internet in my attic studio, second it's never been an issue for me, third I pay $10 a gig for bandwidth so any updates add to the cost of my software budget. X3e seems as solid a release as 8.5 was so I guess I'll plan on staying put another 5 years. 
 
My W 8.1 office computer is mostly in the hands of Microsoft and it seems to work fine, but I have it set for me to pick which updates are installed. I will review the list and delete crap that is not relevant to my system.