Jon Cave

If you don’t check your admin panel on your WordPress install very often (maybe because you prefer to use remote publishing) or you want to make sure 
that your clients’ WordPress installations are updated, then this is the plugin for you. You don’t have to login to your admin panel regularly, 
suscribe to an RSS feed, or do anything apart from installing this plugin to be notified when an update to WordPress is released.
All you have to do is install Update Notifier and forget it until you receive an email telling you to update.
To change Update Notifier’s options, go to Update Notifier under the main Settings menu. From there you can add a secondary email address 
which will also receive update notifications and you can activate update notifications for themes and plugins.

Update Notifier

Sends email notifications if a new version of WordPress available. Notifications about updates for plugins and themes can also be sent.

Dave Jesch

Steveorevo

SpectrOMTech

ServerPress

This plugin will fix long filename problems on Windows systems when doing updates from third-party plugin repositories, such as updating from EDD based sites.
Usage Scenarios:
We’ve found that users on Windows systems that are upgrading themes and plugins from a third-party repository, such as an Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) site have problems. They will see an error message of “Update Failed: Could not create directory…”. The reason for this is that during the update process, the file name requested from the EDD site has the product name, user name and other information encoded within it so that EDD knows who is requesting the file. This results in a very long file name. This is not necessarily a problem WordPress itself, or even EDD, as this works on non-Windows systems. But if you are running WordPress on Windows and see this error, it is because of the long file name requested.
If you are using DesktopServer for your local development on Windows and would like to use the Windows Compatibility Fix plugin as a Design Time plugin, you can install this in your C:\xampplite\ds-plugings directory and it can then be automatically activated and used with all of your local development web sites. This allows you to use the plugin in your local environment, where it’s needed and not to deploy it to your live environment where it may not be needed. For more information on DesktopServer and local development tools, please visit our web site at: https://serverpress.com/get-desktopserver/
Because this fix is only needed on Windows systems, the plugin checks the operating system on which it is running and does not initialize itself. If you are having problems with the update process on non-Windows systems, it is more likely an issue with directory permissions.
How it Works:
The Windows Compatibility Fix plugin uses a couple of WordPress filters employed during the update process. It modifies the name of the file that is downloaded to your system, shortening it to just a few characters. This allows WordPress’s update process to work correctly on Windows systems by not creating the long file name in the first place.
Support:
<blockquote>
Support Details: We are happy to provide support and help troubleshoot issues. Visit our Contact page at <a href="http://serverpress.com/contact/" rel="nofollow ugc">http://serverpress.com/contact/</a>. Users should know however, that we check the WordPress.org support forums once a week on Wednesdays from 6pm to 8pm PST (UTC -8).
</blockquote>
ServerPress, LLC is not responsible for any loss of data that may occur as a result of using this tool. We strongly recommend performing a site and database backup before testing and using this tool. However, should you experience such an issue, we want to know about it right away.
We welcome feedback and Pull Requests for this plugin via our public GitHub repository located at: <a href="https://github.com/ServerPress/Windows-Compatibility-Fix" rel="nofollow ugc">https://github.com/ServerPress/Windows-Compatibility-Fix</a>

Windows Compatibility Fix

I'm using DesktopServer on Windows and was unable to get a plugin update from an EDD store to update (not an EDD plugin). I came across a forum that mentioned this plugin, and figured I'd give it a try. After installing, the update worked perfectly.

Works Great!

Fixes long filename problem on Windows systems when doing updates, such as updating from EDD based sites.

Update Notifier vs Windows Compatibility Fix