Doug's Mailbag: Limiting Restarts in Windows 8
Here's some reader feedback on how big of an issue patch restarts is and the news that they will be limited in Windows 8:
Don't get me wrong, I know why forced restarts have to occur, but I think if Windows were a real operating system, it would be able to deal with concurrency much better. A Unix OS will allow a file to be modified even if something else is holding a file pointer to the file for read access. I don't view this as a problem. Windows does. Or Microsoft's OS is so stuck in backwards compatibility land that it can't get around it.
-Alan
Frequent restarts are only an issue if you shutdown your machine regularly (for instance, with notebooks). I leave my desktop systems on and when I arrive in the morning, all the patches are done. But every time I sit down on my son's laptop or my wife's desktop system, I have to install a bunch of stuff because they don't have administrator privileges. The Windows patches aren't so bad but the iTunes and Adobe patches are a nightmare because they are so frequent.
-Marc
Being a small shop, patch related server restarts are rarely more than an annoyance. Our users are accustomed to brief outages after business hours. For desktops, it is a non-issue. Regardless, any improvement is welcome.
-George
I will bet that Windows 8 will never blue screen either...
-Lester
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/30/2011 at 1:18 PM