
Why does Windows require a restart after installing updates? - Shmebulock
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Windows-require-a-restart-after-installing-updates-If-I-understand-correctly-this-could-be-avoided-if-the-Windows-development-team-made-clever-use-of-their-own-shadow-copy-technologies/answer/Mark-Phaedrus?ch=10&share=5b81f1fd&srid=TLfr
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bediger4000
Wow, that's a lot of consequences for what probably seemed like a simple,
obvious design decision. It's rare to see an honest acknowledgment of this,
but it raises questions like "what other early, obvious design decisions make
Windows goofy today?" Drive letters? Backslash as path separator? Magic file
names like CON, LPT, AUX?

~~~
Xolvix
I think it's worth giving drive letters some credit. It makes it very easy to
mentally designate a drive, whereas people can get confused about the concept
of UNIX-style mount points since people don't mentally distinguish between a
regular directory and a mount point (they'll look both the same).

Also Windows has had the ability to mount a drive at an arbitrary location for
a while now (so not just a drive letter), but as far as I'm aware it requires
the command line to do so.

------
wahern
TL;DR: Unix inode indirection permits clean file replacement without
overwriting existing copies or disrupting running processes. Windows' file
system architecture lacks this concept. In-place upgrades aren't a realistic
option for Windows without some serious contortions and caveats.

