It's 2015 and yet for all the advances in software, we STILL haven't gotten past the need to restart your computer after many Windows updates. Is Windows 10 going to solve this?

Reboots are still required, though not that often. I think I had three or four such requests since I installed them, though my memory may be faulty.

Tell ya what, I hate this fricken auto update nonsense. It crashes my games sometimes.

Never had the computer tell me to restart though... probably because I never look :)

Because Windows updating mechanism sux. Install a driver reboot. Uninstall driver reboot. Uninstall driver to install driver, reboot, reboot and if you're lucky more reboot.

And then you have to do the same thing for your anti-virus software and a bunch of other software.
When I still used Windows I had to reboot the PC several times and let it install updates for hours several times a month.

In my experience, Windows is nothing else than "Microsoft Internet Explorer, the operating system" because Microsoft have a giant user base and a huge budget but can't fix their OS.

I just find it an absolute annoyance when I have a bazillion tabs open in Firefox, plus dozens of folders open, other programs and text docs open, and then I need to close it all and restart my machine because of an update. Yes I can "restore session" on Firefox, but it's still a great hassle.

I wish I knew, I hv been getting a few 'auto' reboots the past few wks due 2 the updates while I was surfing the net & the sudden closure of the windows & subsequent restart are sure getting on my nerves. I wld rather they just prompt u 4 updates via the notification on the bottom right corner & let u choose when 2 do the updates.

Perhaps because files that are still in use can't be deleted or overwritten? Who knows...

The kernel loves locking files, even if they won't be loaded again once they are in memory like the kernel. That means any program that was opened, read, or hinted it was looked at gets locked and can't be changed/deleted/renamed. And windows loves locking a lot of the files it needs to update.

Linux and Unix on the other hand you're free to delete your entire operating system (if you have root privileges), meaning you can update all your files at once, then reboot and watch all the updates take instant effect... Of course if you were updating Xwindows i'm not sure how that would work, then again it probably wouldn't change much, while the window managers would, and Xwindows mostly would update the video driver sets for it's server capabilities.

Last time I checked my Android also asked to reboot after installing an update.

And this iPad of mine is asking to reboot as I am writing this.

Complaint not only to Microsoft, but to Apple and Google as well.

Large OS updates make sense a restart would be needed, especially if the kernel is updated (Better to start clean than stay dirty...). However Microsoft is more annoying because you'll download 11 updates, and have to restart 7 times for seemingly no reason... At least that's my impression when i've seen the automatic updater at work. I've also seen the updater take an hour before/after restarting to do it's update and then restart a second time.

On Windows, if a file is in use, all other attempts to access a file (including deleting it or overwriting it) will fail. For files used by services that are always running, this means the updates can only be installed with a reboot.

On Linux, files that are in use can still be accessed. In fact, it is possible to delete an open file; what actually happens is that the file still exists, but the directory entry in the filesystem is missing. It is then possible to make a new file with that name. Any processes that had the file open at the time of the replace will have the old version of the file open. The file isn't actually deleted until all the processes that have it open have either exited or close the file. As a result, reboots aren't necessary except when the kernel gets updated. (Even then, note that the kernel can be deleted from disk and the system will run properly until it comes time to load a module or the system is rebooted.)

It shouldn't be doing that. I do get notifications about updates requiring to restart, with a suggested restart time of 03:00, and an option to schedule a restart (or restart now). Granted, I am on Win10, but Win7 would also tell me that there are update available, and if I'd like to install them. Don't recall ever having a reboot forced on me on all my years of using Windows.
Not always. You can stop services, change the file, and restart the service, though I'd rather that didn't happen with the OS running, since it would be possible to maliciously modify the file while doing so. While I'm sure it is still possible to do that while rebooting for updates, I do believe it's a bit harder to do so.
Too long since I've seen that happen. I think last time I saw that was when I installed a vanilla Win7 and went the full IE8->IE9->IE10->IE11 route instead of installing IE11 and then going for updates. The more recent updates can be installed even when a reboot is pending, with very few exceptions.

On Linux, you don't need the service to be stopped at all. Instead, all you (or more likely, the system's package manager) need to do is to unlink the files used by the service, put the new files in their place, and *then* restart the service in question.