PC users are all too familiar with computers automatically restarting for an update. And to make the matter even worse, users experienced the annoying loss of data any time they weren’t near computer when the operating system required update.
This frustrating behaviour of Windows 7 will be addressed with the new Windows 8, promises Microsoft. Windows 8 will only allow force reboots once a month, so users should have a little less to worry about losing unsaved data. Farzana Rahman, Windows Update program manager explained that this was a serious consideration the Microsoft teams took into account when they developed Windows 8.
“The challenge we faced was to find the balance between updating with speed and giving notice to the user for upcoming restarts,” wrote Farzana Rahman in a blog post. The montly update, called “Patch Tuesday” will include all the available updates, regardless on when they were released during the past month.
Technology writers suggest users to help their devices to reboot faster even if the scheduled automatic update will be much more predictable. For instance, to integrate solid-state drives (SSDs) that are generally twice as fast as hard disk drives (HDDs). Also using Universal Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) as the modern system to initiate the start of the computer instead of the outdated BIOS could prove helpful. Another focus of Windows 8 is the improvement of reboot or start-up by initializing the device drivers in parallel not one after the other.
Apparently, Microsoft is doing its best to make reboots less painful but there is still quite a long way to go on this road…
