I’ll have a lot to say about Windows Vista later this week. For now, here are a few news updates.
From the Eye Candy department, XPSource has images of new Windows Vista wallpapers from Build 5259. (No, this build will not be available to beta testers.)
More substantive news is in eWeek, which reports on a new feature called Restart Manager, slated to appear in an upcoming test release. As Microsoft Windows honcho Jim Allchin explains, it’s designed to overcome a longstanding Windows frustration:
“If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to [be] updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot,” he said.
“If you have to reboot, then what happens is that the system, together with the applications, takes a snapshot of the state: the way things are on the screen at that very moment, and then it just updates and restarts the application, or in the case of an operating system update, it will bring the operating system back exactly where it was,” Allchin said.
A brief article on Microsoft’s developer site adds a few more details:
Restart Manager works with Microsoft Update, Windows Update, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Microsoft Software Installer, and Microsoft Systems Management Server to detect processes that have files in use and to gracefully stop and restart services without the need to restart the entire machine. Applications that are written to take advantage of the new Restart Manager features can be restarted and restored to the same state and with the same data as before the restart.
Good idea.
Ed Bott 