Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Video Driver Update Without Restart in Windows 7

Does anyone remember not having to restart after the simplest Windows Update? I think there was one last year...

Something happened today that blew my mind. I started Windows Update on my Vista laptop and saw there were 4 important updates. "What updates are necessary today for Windows 7?," I asked myself. I opened Windows Update (herein referred to as WU because I am tired of typing it) and there were no critical updates, but two optional ones.

One was for the monitor I'm using, an Acer V193W (who knows why?) and for my video card, a GeForce 6600. I told WU to go ahead with both updates and went about whatever it was I wanted to do. I was reading e-mail when it happened, and swore I'd experienced the first hiccup with the beta OS.

The screen went black and I saw a blinking cursor at top left, as if the machine had restarted as a result of a hard crash. "WTF just happened?," I said. Then the desktop came back and the browser window resituated itself in the maximized position where I had it previously. A little pop-up at bottom right told me that my video driver had been installed successfully.

This tells me something wonderful - that things in Windows 7 are so modular that restarting the GUI with a new graphics driver doesn't even bother any other part of the system. Isn't that great? Vista promised fewer restarts and I believed them. They lied. Windows 7 just surprised the crap out of me with the <blink> "Okay, done" -style of updating this morning.

Just for reference, I've been running Windows 7 since Friday, January 10, 2009 and I have not been forced to restart yet.



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