> why they have to make updating the system so painful with Windows I've actually thought about this and I've come up with a pretty decent explanation. Most U

> why they have to make updating the system so painful with Windows I've actually thought about this and I've come up with a pretty decent explanation. Most UNIX filesystems have inodes, which essentially represent a filesystem object's content, and directory entries, which are how user code specifies which file it wants to access. A directory entry is basically just a name and a pointer to an inode. An inode is deleted when it isn't referenced by any directory entries and isn't being used by any programs. One important practical effect of all this architecture is that deleting files on UNIX-like systems (for example, to replace them with a newer version) generally doesn't disturb any programs that are using those files. Another handy feature of many UNIX filesystems from the perspective of software updates is that mv'ing one file onto another will result in an atomic replacement operation if source and destination are on the same filesystem. Windows filesystems don't have any of this infrastructure, so Windows has to do updates when nothing but the kernel and updater are running, i.e. during startup or shutdown.