In the early days of Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0, it wasn’t uncommon for servers to reboot or need to be rebooted on a regular basis. Applications were not as well behaved as they are today and the operating system wasn’t as stable. This changed with Windows 2000, when unexpected failures became much less common. But there were still a lot of hotfixes and patches to install on a regular basis, most of which required reboots. Hopefully Windows Server 2003 will continue the upward trend in availability and further reduce the number of reboots that are required.

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