Christopher R. Lee said:
For this idea to work, M$ would have to think of another way of
automatically installing their updates. This should not be done at
shut-down time, since when a user tells a computer to switch off it should
do just that, within a specified time limit.
Windows downloads the updates and waits until shutdown so as not to
interfere with your work. Some updates can, and will, be installed
automatically in the background. Some require a reboot to complete them.
It is these that are normally performed at shutdown time. There's normally
an icon in the taskbar telling you the update is ready to be installed and
there's nothing to stop you installing it manually by double-clicking the
icon; the computer will reboot as part of the update process.
A side effect of current practice encourages is that users tend to leave
equipment not totally shut down, which raises economy and safety issues.
I believe the general MS philosophy is to encourage the use of Sleep mode,
which puts the computer into an extremely low-power state. To the user it
looks almost identical to hibernation. The big difference is it doesn't
save the RAM to the hard drive, therefore a minimal amount of power is used
to keep the memory alive. The hard drive, graphics card and all other
hardware are switched off, the fans power down and to all intents and
purposes the thing looks as though it's powered off. Because the RAM is
kept intact, and a minimal amount of power is still being used, it only
takes about five seconds to switch back on, as opposed to maybe thirty to
come out of hibernation. Everything is as it was when you left it. Any
open applications are still running and all open windows are in the same
state you left them in. I've even hit the Sleep button in the middle of a
game, just to see what happened, and when I switched back on it never missed
a beat! I've never seen a previous version of Windows manage that.
Even if you do a full shutdown your power supply will still be drawing
current unless you physically switch it off, either using the power switch
on the back (if there is one) or at the wall outlet. Sleep mode uses very
little more power than this.
Laptops (and presumably desktop PCs with appropriate drivers for the UPS)
are able to transition from Sleep to Hibernate in the event of a power (or
battery) failure.
I tend to shut down my PC (or at least reboot it) about once a week; other
than that I just hit the sleep button.