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I'd be willing to bet this is more to do with chipset drivers and associated software than Windows itself.

You may lose that bet. Nobody is writing or pushing driver updates for 10 year old hardware, yet Microsoft's strategy to cripple S3 sleep to compete with mobile OSes is well documented, with the, again, widely documented effect of setting on fire laptops their owners believed were "shut down".

Hell even today in 2025 I installed my Wacom tablet drivers (USB drawing tablet) and the installer says "You must restart your system... Note: Shut down is not the same as Restart", like what does that even mean? It's a classic Microsoft move I'd say.

Well, Windows computers have a prominent button that evolved from the ATX shutdown button that actually used to turn off energy completely, but the button has been long since hijacked to do all sort of fancy sleep gymnastics; there is no other "shutdown" button that the user can operate.

So I can definitely see why a driver installer is very nervous about people "shutting down" their devices to reload the system. Why would a full restart be required in the 3rd millennium to load a driver for an USB input device is of course another Microsoft philosophical moment.

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