Reboot vs. Restart Windows

[Matt Wozniski]

> Having said that, there isn't an official way (that I'm aware of anyway)
> to restart windows without restarting the system itself.  However, I do
> know a little trick that is supposed to be just as good.  Open the task
> manager, and find 'explorer.exe' in the process list.  Perform an
> end-task on this process.  It should reload the windows system files, or
> atleast thats my understanding.

It's not just as good.  Like I said, the reason a restart is needed is
because Windows actually overwrites DLLs that are in use during the
next reboot, once they're no longer locked.  When explorer.exe is
reloaded, it will reload all the files, but it won't load a newer
version of them, since it won't know that there IS a newer version
unless you explicitly overwrite the old version while explorer is
still dead.  Even then, you run into issues with SPF, which, IIRC,
can't be disabled in XP SP2, and XP is likely to just overwrite the
new one with the old one again.

~Matt

On 10/30/06, Joey Officer <jofficer@wi.rr.com> wrote:
> What you are referring to was the 'soft' restart.  If you held the SHIFT
> key (either I think) during a 'Shutdown -> Restart;  it would restart
> only the windows software.  This worked on all versions of windows
> through windows Me! ... It does not work on any current version of
> Windows, due to the fact that current versions are built around Windows
> NT, which did not have a DOS foundation.  Windows 95/98/ME were
> applications that ran on top of DOS, similar (atleast in concept) to the
> really old Windows 3.x days (and older if you can think back that far).
>
> Having said that, there isn't an official way (that I'm aware of anyway)
> to restart windows without restarting the system itself.  However, I do
> know a little trick that is supposed to be just as good.  Open the task
> manager, and find 'explorer.exe' in the process list.  Perform an
> end-task on this process.  It should reload the windows system files, or
> atleast thats my understanding.
>
> Good luck all.
> joey
>
>
> Benjamin Madore wrote:
> > So as to add to the confusion...
> >
> > At one point, and maybe still, you could "Restart Windows" without rebooting
> > your computer. If I recall correctly, it would drop to the subsystem (DOS?)
> > and a message stating "Restarting Windows..." would display on your screen.
> >
> > So, restarting was not necessarily rebooting at one time. I don't know how
> > this plays out, though, as either would do what you wanted.
> >
> > BTW, can one say they restarted Cygwin without restarting windows? Does that
> > make sense?
> >
> > On Mon, October 30, 2006 7:56 am, Mike Maxwell said:
> >
> >> Certainly 'reboot' is used a lot.  But the standard Ms Windows message
> >> is 'restart Windows.'  And I don't know the history, but I would not be
> >> surprised if the reason it started being used (around the time of Win95
> >> or Win98, from what I can tell) is that it is less ambiguous--exactly
> >> the point I've been trying to make.
> >> --
> >>
> >
> >
> >
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