Why do some computer software updates require a restart and others don’t?
In: Technology
If the update changes the code that controls the printer, you don’t have to reboot because you can stop the printer, install the code, and start it back up again.
However, if the code you want to update controls memory or storage, you can’t just turn those things off during the update, because the computer will halt. So, these updates work differently, they don’t change the running program (because that’s dangerous). Instead they change the files on disk that are used to load the program when the computer boots. That doesn’t change the running computer, at all, so you need to reboot for the change to take effect.
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