I thought more recent OS had ways to update files currently in use and not require reboots.
Corporate policy of rebooting once a week and forcing it is killing me: I usually have tens of excel windows interlinked, and having to reboot daily just saps my will to live….
In: 68
When you launch some software the code is copied from the hard drive to the memory and then launched from there. Changing the software on the hard drive will only affect the software for the next time it launches. The issue is that while the software is running there are lots of references to specific areas of the code in the memory. And the structure of the memory is implied by the code. Imagine if Excel stored formulas and data in separate files, updating the formulas without changing the data would cause all kinds of havoc. Data being in the wrong columns, formulas updating the wrong cell, etc. So you can not just change the code in memory of some running software without restarting it to clear the variable data stored in memory.
It should be noted that there are a few notable solutions. Back in the 80s Ericson came up with a different way to use references between code and data for their Erlang programming language which allowed them to upgrade code on live software. But there were disadvantages to this that made it less popular then other programming languages at the time, although it have recently gained a lot of popularity. The other notable solution is to have some special software that can go through the data and update the references. However this is very ineffective and often require developers to test and fix each patch. Currently this is only available for some Linux distributions and only for the kernel and some core libraries that is hard to restart. And even then it is a paid enterprise option for use on high value servers.
Your companies policy is not just related to updates though. Most modern updates do not require a full reboot. They might require certain applications to restart or drivers to be reloaded. Updates to the core system kernel and core libraries are not that frequent. But there are bugs in the system which manifests over time rather then at once, especially on Windows computers. So rebooting once a week is a way to keep the number of support issues down.
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