Even if you know absolutely nothing about computers, turning off a PC is pretty simple, right?
When you press the button on the front or the side or just click shut down on the Windows start menu,
and that's supposed to do the trick. But wait!
It turns out that shut down in Windows 10 doesn't actually mean shut down.
Is this just another example of computer companies not trusting us to operate our own stuff
or something else going on? So here's the deal.
Remember the hibernate feature that became popular back in the days of Windows 2000,
where you could save all the contents of your RAM to your disk before powering the computer off?
Which would significantly cut down on startup time? Do you remember that?
Hibernate was a big deal because older laptops tended to be power hogs.
So hibernate offered a way to quickly resume working without putting the machine in standby or sleep modes
that would still drop power. As laptops have become more power efficient over the years,
hibernate was de-emphasized, although you can still show the hibernate command
in the start menu by checking this box. In favor of a feature called hybrid sleep,
which would put the computer in sleep mode but also dump the contents of RAM to the disk.
So the computer would wake up more quickly than it would from pure hibernation,
but in case of power loss, the system could still recover its previous state
from its hard drive or SSD. So with that established, let's bring it back to the title of the video.
What happens when you click shut down? Well, Microsoft has taken the idea behind hybrid sleep
and added yet another feature called fast startup
that actually changes the way your computer shuts down.
Here's how it works. Fast startup, which is enabled by default on Windows 10,
takes the state of the Windows kernel, which is essentially the core elements
of the operating system and saves it to the disk. However, this only happens after Windows logs you off,
so none of the data from programs or files you were working on gets saved.
In this sense, it's closer to a normal shutdown than hibernation, but doesn't get 100% of the way there.
The benefit of fast startup is exactly what it sounds like.
Your PC doesn't have to spend tons of time re-initializing critical Windows components
when you power the system back on, allowing for shorter boot times.
However, there's a downside that can cause really puzzling issues
if you're unaware that fast startup even exists. Problems that are present within the kernel itself,
such as a misbehaving device driver, that would normally disappear with a full shutdown
can recur when you start your computer back up if you have fast startup enabled.
So because Microsoft figures people are more likely to hit restart than shutdown
if some bug necessitates a reboot, restart actually cycles your PC through a full shutdown,
whereas shutdown counter-intuitively does not.
Wow, as wild. But there are ways around fast startup
if you wanna ensure your computer is completely clearing out its current state
every time you turn it off. You can simply disable fast startup
by going to control panel, then power settings, then choose what the power buttons do,
not the most obvious place to find it, but at least it's a simple fix.
You can also leave fast startup enabled and perform a full shutdown on demand
by holding the shift key when clicking shutdown from the start menu.
There's a chance you may not even miss the slightly faster startup if you're running a modern system with a speedy SSD.
So it might be worth it to bust out the stopwatch and see how much time you're saving
with the feature on versus off, a totally normal thing that people do with their free time.
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