Microsoft announced in Australia that a component of the Vista operating system will help the patch process.

By maintaining the state of running applications and opened documents, the Freeze Dry technology in Windows Vista will make the patching process less painful for Windows administrators, ZDNet Australia reported from the Tech Ed conference.

A senior product manager, Amy Stephan, discussed the feature, called Freeze Dry, at the conference. Maintenance of application state has been mentioned before as a possible feature in the long-delayed 64-bit operating system. Now it appears to be a reality.

More developers will get to see the second beta version of Windows Vista this month, as Microsoft hosts a Los Angeles conference for developers. Admins will anticipate the feature, as it would make the monthly patching process on Windows Vista machines much easier than it is now.

Software patches have been a source of night and weekend work for Windows support staff for some time. Since many patches require a system be rebooted after installation, the updates have to be done out of normal working hours. But there is always one person, sometimes two, and usually an executive, who doesn’t shutdown or logoff her PC.

A prudent admin would prefer not to wipe out an executive’s opened and most likely unsaved work, and will bypass that machine to service it later. If the Freeze Dry technology works as advertised, the prospect of updating that machine becomes a safer one.

David Utter is a staff writer for webproworld covering technology and business. Email him here.