Time for your computer to update? Well you better make sure you’ve saved everything because it’s gonna automatically restart soon. Sound familiar?
Well it may be a thing of the past, if what Microsoft says about Windows 8 is to be believed.
Windows 7 is extremely annoying in the way it handles software updates. Users receive a notification that their computer will restart unless they manually prevent the reset – but even that only gives users as long as four hours before the reboot eventually happens.
If users aren’t on their computer when the notification pops up, they run the risk of losing all unsaved data when the computer shuts off and restarts to apply all necessary updates.
With Windows 8, these forced reboots will only happen once a month. It should be a sigh of relief to anyone who lost content from an automatic restart (such as, say, a news article that someone had been working on for a couple hours, cough cough).
“The challenge we faced was to find the balance between updating with speed and giving notice to the user for upcoming restarts,” explained Windows Update program manager Farzana Rahman in a Microsoft blog post.
Even Rahman admitted that Windows 7’s update process was “annoying.” The once monthly updates will happen on “Patch Tuesday.”
As Rahman explained, it “does not matter when [other] updates that require restarts are released in a month, since the restarts will wait till” Patch Tuesday.
