Windows 7 - Restart without closing programs?

Hi All,
I have a question that I have been unable to solve but first I will start off by saying I am running boot camp on a mac, just so there is no confusion. I am an architecture student and am using a program called Revit to render 3D models regularly. Due to the long render times find myself stuck waiting many hrs up to many days with my computer tied up rendering. Recently, after a lapse in smart thinking, my battery went dead and I thought I had lost 4 hrs of rendering time. I then disappointingly restarted my computer to restart the render but found that Windows had saved, as a last effort to maintain my program files and unsaved data, the progress of the render and it continued upon reboot.

My question is: is there a way to mimic this on demand so that I can boot into osx without having to wait for renderings to finish or close them prematurely?

Thanks for your help

As far as I know, Boot Camp is the 'Mac version' of dual booting, correct? In that case, the short answer is no; if you switch to OSX, you will have to shut down or hibernate your Windows installation.

However, something you can try is using virtual machines. This way you can have OSX as your main system, and have Windows run on a virtual machine inside OSX, allowing you to switch between the two as you please.

If there is a way to periodically save your rendering progress, that control would be in the software doing the rendering. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you poked around you might well find a switch to set for save times. (every 10 minutes, every half hour, etc) If the program does such long runs, I would have expected them to build in such an option. Look for it.
You could then exit the windows environment, go to mac and pick up where you left off when you come back, which by my reading is what you have in mind.

Virtual Machine would not be a good choice for this as only CPU resources would be availible to Revit and would cause the renderings to take even longer (As Revit uses video card resources as well).

But back to the OP question. What happened when your laptop lost power was windows Hibernated. What it does is saves whatever is in the RAM to disk. Next time you booted to windows it restored what it saved to disk to RAM and continued where it left off. You can manually hibernate by selecting it from the shut down menu options. If it is not availible then a setting needs to be changed in the power config. I can't help you there as I always have it disabled.

My usual disclaimer: I'm not an expert in anything, especially Revit!

I found this Autodesk WikiHelp guide and went through the section for Creating the Rendered Image. I didn't find anything pertaining to saving, and then resuming, a rendering in progress. Since you're more familiar with the program perhaps there's something here that I missed that would help you.

Creating the Rendered Image - WikiHelp

To enable or disable hibernate:

Hibernate - Enable or Disable

Hey thanks for all of your ideas. I will try to hibernate on a not so important render next time and check results. I didn't even consider this. @CreepinJesus I did lots of research into running parallels or something of the like when I first decided to run a split system and found that any of these programs work very poorly when used to do stuff that require such large amounts of resources. Also having friends who have tried this and wanted to incinerate their computers when working in cad or Revit I don't recommend it. However I'm sure its a handy application for pc only programs that aren't trying to replicate reality :P In an ideal world a dedicated computer for rendering would make life worth living.
@Magron & Marsmimar I haven't heard of any program that allows you to do this. It would be amazing and is a great idea but unfortunately does not exist (to my knowledge).

I concur it likely hibernated which saves your desktop and work to HD so that it resumes on desktop. I'm not sure I'd trust Hibernate to preserve a really big and crucial project, though.

If you're Dual Booting, note that you won't be able to boot the other OS until you've resumed and then Shut Down or Restarted Windows 7. This of course clears your desktop of all work and saves nothing unless prompted first.

I was going to mention this earlier. I have any very weird issues happen with certain applications trying to resume from hibernate.

That's not uncommon. Computers just don't LIKE hibernate and many have problems with it. lol. If there's any weak points in your system, hibernate will usually show them up.

Windows 7 cleared up many of these issues.

I configure my installs to sleep at 30, then hibernate at an hour. I find it easier to walk away and not have to worry about coming back because 90% of the time the work is intact on desktop upon resume.

You only have to remember to also regularly restart to avoid waxy buildup.