It's been changed in Windows 8 to not have that automatic restart as bad. There's also a Group Policy which lets you disable the forced update. It just tells you there's updates that require you to restart.

I believe the Group Policy requires Pro though. And this was Windows 8: a full-screen banner would pop up saying the computer would restart in 15 minutes, with no option to permanently dismiss it.

Err, I meant 8.1. I forgot what they did, but I think it gives you an extra day now instead of just 15 minutes.

I can't tell you how many times I've had my system automatically reboot while i was in the middle of working, once during a presentation. There is a "hide this notice" button, but not "Please don't shutdown right now" button.

Really, really, horrible experience.

During the beta phase, they had mentioned that updates wouldn't do that, that they would auto apply the next time you rebooted.

I really think that all they should do is display a message that says, "New security updates have been installed. To ensure your computer is secure, please reboot your computer."

Updates do auto-apply the next time you reboot--provided you do reboot, at some point.

The problem Microsoft is balancing against is people who never ever reboot their computers no matter what--and thus never update, and become infection vectors. They have to force these people to update against their will to ensure the digital equivalent of herd immunity. And it's really quite hard to tell whether the user trying to "permanently" dismiss the "REBOOT NOW GOSH DARNIT" popup really has something urgent they're doing, or is just a "power user" who thinks they know better than the computer.

But then people won't do it. You have to force security update installs. There's really no better way around it. I think you have 2 days after the updates install to before it forces you to reboot. That should be enough time right?

Perhaps a better question is why a reboot is needed in so many circumstances. Windows users have been trained to accept reboots as normal over many, many years. We used to need to reboot after every single application install. Very few OS pieces should actually require a full reboot instead of merely restarting a process or two.

Windows cannot delete/replace files, that are open. That's the cause of most reboots, it will replace them before services or apps that use them start again.

Not that I'm apologizing it's behavior - it was a design decision that Windows team made in the past, when it was deemed not important and worth reduction in complexity. Now just it comes and bites them back.

>Windows cannot delete/replace files, that are open.

Not exactly. Its up to the application which opens files to control whether the file can be modified externally. It can do this in two ways. (1) Open the file in some FILE_SHARE_* mode and let the OS sort it out. (2) use opportunistic locks that will detect external access and then let the app decide how to react - anti-virus programs use this when they are scanning files.

>That's the cause of most reboots, it will replace them before services or apps that use them start again.

Actually the cause for reboots is much more mundane. Files replaced on disks means new programs using those files get the new version, however, processes which are already running keep using the older version in memory and are thus open to being exploited by bugs that are already patched.

On servers, things are a bit different. To prevent downtime you can 'hotpatch' the update and thus avoid the reboot.

Linux doesn't solve the problem either, with the ability to replace open files. It just means you run into potential compatibility issues if you modify a shared lib and then two processes try to perform IPC that might rely on false assumptions (I believe this is exceedingly rare in practice) and to update kernel components, long-lived services you still need to restart them.

You can perform hot updates to a system but it can be complex and there are a number of restrictions on the types of updates that can be done.