A little discussed feature of the upcoming Windows Vista is called 'Freeze Dry', and it's sure to be a blessing for all of us who leave our PCs running rather than shutting everything down when we move away from the keyboard. Have you ever come back only to find that an update has rebooted the system and you've lost the data you were working on? Have you ever clicked 'Yes' to a restart request only to realise you hadn't saved our data? There's no need to worry about that frustrating circumstance any more.

Built on a core of software technology already in Windows XP, the 'Freeze Dry' feature will recognise the application your document is attached to, save the current state of open programs, save your data, and then restore all to as it was before after the reboot.

The feature is so far being touted as a useful one for IT managers. That seems to be a quite limited way to promote it, because the feature will doubtless be useful to just about everybody. In addition to protecting your data, the 'Restart manager' which underpins the feature better manages files which need to be 'locked' during the update process, and reduces the number of reboots needed by controlling the update process more closely.