The vast majority of windows drivers can be installed and upgraded in place, since at least NT/windows 2000. That is unless they regressed something in win10. B

The vast majority of windows drivers can be installed and upgraded in place, since at least NT/windows 2000. That is unless they regressed something in win10. Back 20 years ago, I was doing windows driver development and even then outside of some storage filters, and maybe IIRC the graphics drivers all you needed to install/update a driver in place was the package/.inf files. I'm pretty sure that continues to work as of at least win7 where one can go into the device manager and click hardware without drivers and install/activate most things without rebooting. Or upgrade/switch drivers for a piece of hardware. Its only if windows fails to stop the device does it request a system reboot. Probably the biggest problem, are the stupid little monitoring utilities that some vendors provide that open the device and never respond to device state change requests.