When will Windows grow up so it can update itself without restarts???

I installed The Core edition of RP yesterday, and received my first 4 Windows updates today. It will apparently automatically restart itself in 2 days, which is better than ten minutes, but not really good enough. Surely its about time Windows was able to stop and restart services to update files and data without having to reboot everything.

On the Professional Edition installed a week ago, Windows updates fails with an error, and cannot even install printer drivers from the internet, so it will have to be reinstalled.

2 days?

I hadn't noticed that bit.

While I am somewhat sympathetic, I believe that Windows (7 & 8) are as good (or better) than OS X and Linux with respect to updates.

Win 7 & 8 can update graphics drivers without a re-boot, but my Ubuntu installation always requires a restart for this. And every time there is a multi-patch update for my MacBook it requires a restart. Just my opinion, of course, but Windows ain't so bad with updates...

If you update something with kernel components, you're going to have to restart Windows to do it (kernel unload, patch, then reload). Anything in userland no longer requires a reboot unless the file(s) to be updated are in use by something that won't unload them. Hot patching in Windows has been possible since Windows 2000, but it's not as easy as it would seem (and having to block an entire kernel and patching in memory before continuing execution would cause a rather significant performance hit during patch as well, which could be as bad (or worse, if the in-memory patch fails) as rebooting on uptime and SLAs.