Windows Vista Restart Manager
August 10th, 2009
No comments
 Windows Vista has a new feature / application called as the Restart Manager. Lets say, if an application or Vista itself, needs to update itself, the Installer calls upon the Restart Manager, to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does so, and this happens without a reboot. |
| And if this cannot be done, then what it does is that it takes a snapshot of the system, together with the applications, 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, after the reboot! |
 Lets say a a user is working on a Word document, say, winvistaclub.doc and the cursor was on co-ordinates, say col 5, line 7. And the system has to update either or both of them. The Restart Manager does 5 things.- It looks for all processes that are using this file. - Applies the updates - Restarts those processes - And not only that; Restart Manager preserves the exact state of each running process and then restores that state upon restarting the process. It will re-open winvistaclub.doc and restore the cursor to col 5, line 7 ! This is called “freeze-drying” the program. The Restart Manager works in tandem 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 stop and restart services without the need to restart the entire machine. The full functionality of ‘Restart Manager’ is presently available only to select applications written to take advantage of it. Office 2007 is one of them. |
| For those programs which do not support Restart Manager, Vista has introduced what is called as the “side-by-side compliant” dll’s. This enables a program to write a new version of a dll, to the hard disk, even if the old one is still in use! Only when you shut down the program does Vista replace the old version with the new one! |
| One therefore see’s fewer post-update reboots in Vista. More at MSDN. Read more… |
The link below is one of the best blog written by Mark Russinovich (Windows Internal founder) in recent times. This is the most practical way to understand the file copying engine at work both for legacy operating systems and Vista. You can test using process explorer and look at the stack to understand I/O calls, caching mechanism and filters used. If anyone wants to dig deep into stack information and is not able to understand anything, let me know I might be able to help.
