Microsoft revealed in a post on the Building Windows 8 blog that the next-generation Windows OS will require fewer reboots for Windows patches and updates. To anyone who has lost hours of work thanks to an unexpected automatic reboot, that probably sounds awesome. But, there is a reason the system reboots, and the solution proposed by Microsoft doesn’t solve the issue.

It would be nice if the PC never required a reboot, and all patches just installed silently in the background without ever interrupting you. As Microsoft explains, though, “there are situations where the installer is not able to update files because they are in use. In these cases, we need to restart your machine to complete the installation.”