Windows Vista will include a new technology known as Freeze Dry designed to maintain application states and unsaved documents even when patches are automatically applied and PCs are rebooted.

Speaking at the Australian Tech Ed conference on the Gold Coast in Queensland this week, senior product manager Amy Stephan offered a preview of the Freeze Dry technology.

Many IT managers plan to automatically install patches and updates on machines during periods when they are inactive, such as overnight or on weekends. However, as some patches require machines to reboot, users who leave documents open and unsaved run the risk of losing that data if the machine is automatically updated.

Freeze Dry eliminates that problem by automatically saving application state and documents and then restoring them once the system restarts, Stephan said.

Microsoft has promoted the general concept of saving application state in earlier discussions of Windows Vista, formerly codenamed Longhorn, but hasn't previously revealed the Freeze Dry moniker.

A new point release of Vista is expected at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles later this month. Officials said this week that beta 2 of the operating system is on target for a wider release before the end of the year.

The software giant isn't the first company to try and grab the Freeze Dry name. In 1999, Hewlett-Packard released a Java compression technology called FreezeDry, and took out a US trademark on the name. However, the technology failed to attract widespread attention, and HP let the trademark lapse in July 2002.