Have you ever wondered why are you asked to restart your computer after installing or uninstalling certain softwares? This happens nearly most of the time and I bet most of you never really asked why do you need to restart or what will happen when you restart your computer. Sometimes it is really annoying because you’re in the midst of doing something and you’re prompted to restart. Of course you can always select “No, I will restart my computer later.” and only restart after finishing your work on your computer but to me, I sometimes tend to worry about the stability of the operating system if I don’t restart. What if I am unable to save my work after spending hours on it? Also, if you don’t restart after installing patches from Windows Updates, your Windows is still vulnerable to the bug that the update is supposed to patch. So, the best practice is to always restart whenever Windows requires to you.

Here is a very common prompt that ask you to restart computer after installing software or updates using InstallShield. It says “InstallShield Wizard Complete. Setup has finished installing XXXXXX on your computer.” You have 2 options to select that is “Yes, I want to restart my computer now” or “No, I will restart my computer later.”
Yes I want to restart my computer now

Here is how you can decide whether to restart or not when you’re prompted to.

The most common reason to require a reboot after an installation is to update or delete a file that is currently open (or otherwise in use) by the operating system or running software, such as a core component of the system, or the binary executable file that is used by an application that was running during the install (which is why most installers always advise you to close all Windows programs before installing — some are nice enough to list running applications that may cause problems, and ask you to close them before continuing.) So, if files that are currently in use must be replaced, a method must be found to do so after the files are no longer in use. Another reason to reboot the computer is to allow the installer to clean up after itself.

The simple solution is to record an entry in a special location defined by Windows that will allow the file(s) to be copied, renamed, or deleted after the system reboots but before most of Windows is loaded (or any user applications start.) It is this method that most installer systems use.

WhyReboot is a small (100KB) Windows application that helps you decide whether to reboot your computer after running an installer. It does this by displaying a list of “pending file operations” (rename, delete, etc) that will occur after rebooting your computer.

Here is an example of a prompt that ask me to restart my computer after installing Kaspersky Anti-Virus program. It says “You must restart to complete the installation/uninstallation of Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0. Click Yes to restart now or No if you plan to restart later.
You must restart to complete the installation/uninstallation of Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0. Click Yes to restart now or No if you plan to restart later

Now I run WhyReboot to see why Kaspersky wants me to reboot.
why restart after installing software
As you can see, Kaspersky is unable to delete some files in temporary directory created during installation. When I restart, the _u14D2N.tmp, Au_.exe and ~nsu.tmp will be deleted. Since restarting Windows only deletes 3 temporary files, it is NOT important nor critical to restart my computer immediately.

[ Download WhyReboot ]

Technorati Tags: , , ,