I think I just had my first experience with the Windows Vista Restart Manager. I'm not sure whether I particularly liked the experience, though.
See, it was updating the video driver for my laptop. What happens is, Vista starts installing the updates in the background - it pops up a "updates are installing" toast, and you can keep working.
Except that while I was working, my screen all-of-a-sudden goes black, flashes up at 800x600 (or some equally low resolution), goes black again, and pops back up at the native resolution.
All of that took about 5 seconds, which isn't a huge amount of time, but it was pretty distracting to say the least, but most annoying of all, because it popped back at 800x600 for a second or two, all my non-maximized windows stayed at their smaller size when it popped back at the native resolution!
I'm sure that if it had just been updating Word or something, I could probably live with Word dropping out for a second or two while updating. But the problem with this was twofold:
- It was updating "in the background" so I'd pretty much forgotten it. When the screen flashed off, I thought my computer had crashed! And,
- When everything came back, it'd screwed up all my window positions and sizes.
Maybe it's just because I'm so used to it, but I'd have prefered to just reboot.