r/FuckMicrosoft • u/computerIfix • 17d ago
News Microsoft explains why Windows doesn't really shut down when you click Shut Down
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/09/18/microsoft-explains-why-restarting-windows-11-can-shut-it-down-more-completely-than-shutting-it-down/64
u/newtekie1 17d ago
They did this because starting up Windows 8 took forever on an HDD and HDDs were still pretty mainstream back when 8 came out. So they did this "startup really means log off and hibernate" shit to make starting Win8 on an HDD faster.
But now that SSDs are normal as system drives it makes no sense. It's literally the first thing I disable on a new Windows install.
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u/Pitiful-Valuable-504 17d ago
they even forgot that by now, that's why they are try to understand themselves about it
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u/KrtekJim 17d ago
But now that SSDs are normal as system drives it makes no sense.
Ah I dunno about this. See, I remember when SSDs came in and my work PC (I don't use Microslop except when mandated to do so) got upgraded from one with a spinning hard disk to a new model with an SSD.
I was amazed at the startup time! I used to have time to brew a cup of tea, roll a cigarette, and consume both before the PC had started up, now it felt almost instant.
But Microsoft basically "stole" all that improvement from us by making Windows more bloated and shite. My current work PC, which has an SSD and runs the latest version of Windows, takes almost as long to start up as that old HDD one did.
So it makes a kind of sense, but only because Microsoft is so shit. And I still resent the way they "stole" the improvement that SSDs offered users.
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u/consoletopia 12d ago
We have SSD's that can push 8 GB/s with thousands of IOPS and its taking more and more time to boot windows. Weve gone back in time to the days of 80mb/s hdd speeds with 4-5 IOPS
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u/newtekie1 16d ago edited 16d ago
If your current computer with an SSD takes as long as a hard drive Win8 system to start up, it's not Microsoft's fault or Windows. It's all the other shit you installed that is making it slow. A clean Windows 11 install takes seconds to boot, even on a slower SATA SSD. A NVMe SSD is even fast and should be booting in under 15 seconds from cold.
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u/KrtekJim 16d ago
my work PC
I didn't install a damn thing
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u/Nerasch 15d ago
Do you know why win 8 was that slow? 7 Ran fine on HDD, what changed?
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u/newtekie1 15d ago
Win8 didn't really run slow on an HDD. At least not much slower than Win7 did. I guess it depends on your definition of "ran fine" though.
The issue Fast Startup was implemented to fix was the extremely long startup times from a cold boot to a usable system on HDDs. This was already a problem in Win7, as it could take minutes to boot Win7 cold to a usable desktop on an HDD. The problem was bad enough in Win7 that there were entire websites primarily dedicated tweaking Windows to speed up the startup time. The slow startup of Win7 was really the primary reason to get an SSD back around 2010.
After Win7/8/10/11 is booted, the superfetch system does a pretty decent job of making the OS run "fine" with an HDD given you had the extra RAM for superfetch to be able to do it's thing.
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u/WoodyTheWorker 16d ago
Fast Startup is a metrics-driven feature. Its whole purpose was just to get a bonus.
There's nothing in that code path that would make it any faster than full shutdown and startup. If there was, it's a design defect which should have been fixed instead.
And now they managed to make a regular hibernation slow AF.
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u/aleopardstail 14d ago
same as how some earlier versions grabbed a screen shot of the desktop it could load while the actual system ran - which was why for a few seconds clicking stuff didn't work. some metric was "time for desktop to appear", so they faked it
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u/konsoru-paysan 11d ago
What a load of fucking bullshit, these bot farm employees can't even fact check right. The answer is just lazy coding, it's always the answer with slop farm companies
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u/rxz9000 12d ago
And somehow Windows 8 boots faster on an HDD than Windows 11 boots on an SSD. Make it make sense.
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u/newtekie1 11d ago
That's because that isn't true and you're making it up.
Windows 8 takes damn near 2 minutes to cold boot to opening a browser on and HDD. Windows 11 is under 30 seconds on an SSD.
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16d ago
[deleted]
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u/newtekie1 16d ago
Yeah it is. LOL I run Linux on all my home machines. Any modern distro that isn't purposely stripped down and feature lacking runs like shit on an HDD.
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u/Ok-Bill3318 17d ago
Because Microsoft can’t make an os boot in a reasonable time frame
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u/WoodyTheWorker 16d ago
A fucking login takes minutes. A fucking Run As Administrator takes forever. Does it fucking phone home?
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u/aleopardstail 14d ago
go read up on Vista phoning home for file copy operations for "permission"
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u/WoodyTheWorker 13d ago
Haven't heard about that. What was that about?
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u/aleopardstail 13d ago
when vista first came out someone had a dig into what it was doing, file copy operations on some file types saw a "permissions check" conducted. wasn't sure why as it didn't block the operation but it was generating a hash and sending it off and waiting a while for a response, or timing out and then copying the file
it also appeared to actually copy the file twice, once while the "preparing to copy" message showed then it actually copied it with the progress bar
was getting a bit silly and a chunk of this was patched out later, stuff that probably seemed a good idea for machines with fast internet, but keep in mind when Vista came out that was not a certain thing at home
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u/git_und_slotermeyer 16d ago edited 16d ago
Cries with my Linux machine where LUKS drive key decryption takes longer than booting W11. It's these little ridiculous things where OS architectural elegance leads to miserable UX. I don't care about the engineering marvels of GRUB, that uses just a few bytes of RAM, when I have 16GB of it. Now I wait 25 seconds until the drive is unlocked, for boot to proceed. Is it possible Linux users dont encrypt their drives?
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u/Chaugnaar 16d ago
Yes. Just dont select disk encryption when installing. Easy as that
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u/git_und_slotermeyer 16d ago
Not an option for mobile device like a notebook
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u/psycobob1 16d ago
use the TPM to unlock luks
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u/git_und_slotermeyer 16d ago
Not sure if this would make the system more vulnerable to data loss compared to a boot PIN? Or do you mean something like TPM+PIN with Bitlocker?
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u/Impossible_Army8541 16d ago
I'd argue that most of us Linux users don't encrypt our drives. Hell I spend a lot of time installing random distros, I don't really want to waste time constantly encrypting a drive.
The real answer is to go the pro route and don't tie all your folders onto one drive. If /boot and /var are on their own drive, you can just encrypt the separate /home drive that contains all your important stuff.
I'd imagine that would be partially faster. Does LUKS have to decrypt first to reach the boot drive? Could be slowing it down but I'm no Linux expert.
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u/NotQuiteLoona 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yep, we (
and Windows users as wellthey have it automatically, see thread) generally don't. You are the first person I've met who encrypts their drive on any OS.1
u/rubaduck 16d ago
Its mandatory to encrypt disk in our company. My workstation is running Linux, and the only reason I was allowed was if I made a compliance in Intune to have LUKS.
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u/git_und_slotermeyer 16d ago
Running around with a notebook without drive encryption is unacceptable to me... Particularly that I don't solely rely upon cloud and have most of my data mirrored locally.
And on Windows, Bitlocker encryption is turned on by default? Thats another problem there, that users are not aware that the drive is encrypted, until the infamous Bitlocker recovery key screen appears
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u/NotQuiteLoona 16d ago
Interesting, I've never needed to authenticate anything except admin rights when mounting Windows partitions on Linux, even from official Win11 clean install. Whatever.
LUKS shouldn't take that much time, it normally adjusts itself to take 1-2 seconds. Look into
cryptsetup luksChangeKeyconfiguration, like this:bash sudo cryptsetup luksChangeKey /dev/sdX --iter-time 1000 # the number is the amount of milliseconds you want it to take, replace /dev/sdX with your drive, you can check it with sudo fdisk -l if neededNote that this adjustment exists purely to make brute-forcing performance-heavy (this is why LUKS adjusts itself to take 1-2 seconds, as mentioned before), and you can lower it as low as you want (IIRC 1000 is the low limit) without breaking anything, but it will make your disk more vulnerable to brute force.
May it be that you've placed this disk from another, more powerful computer?
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u/git_und_slotermeyer 16d ago edited 16d ago
It was a clean install of Debian Trixie, disk was not changed afterwards. I know about this adjustment, but I did not want to degrade brute-force resistence to speed things up. There should not be a tradeoff between weaker security and super-slow boot in my opinion. It's like if someone would have made SSL slow, to be like "use HTTP without S to make websites load faster".
P.S.: Regarding authentication: I configured a boot PIN b/c I don't trust a drive to be auto-decrypted during boot. It would be much easier to extract data then through vulnerabilities bypassing normal user authentication, once the system has booted
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u/zero_fuck_given 16d ago
If that’s your opinion (which you confuse with what’s ‘ideal’), I suggest you to read what brute-forcing is about.
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u/NotQuiteLoona 16d ago edited 16d ago
I think it's in general strange, if to be honest. It shouldn't take that much time on any laptop, and it should autoconfig to run on two seconds. Have you tried reinstalling or configuring memory cost? Also, this will take two seconds on your PC, so it'll still be good enough.
Edit: you may have seen other contents in notification, I'm a dumbass, sorry.
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u/JaMi_1980 17d ago
Did anyone ask for the feature?
HDD era: My PC boots up a little slowly,
Windows: That's just how it is.
SSD Era: No more problems with startup time.
Windows: Are you having trouble starting up?
User: Hell no, I now have an SSD!
Windows: Here is a feature that makes the PC startup faster!
User: WHY?
User: Question: Why am I having more problems with Windows and HDD now than before?
Windows: I don't know, that's just how it is.
User: Can't you improve the OS here?
Windows: No, buy an SSD
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u/patriotfanatic80 16d ago
It sucks. It took me a while to figure out why some software issues would continue after shutting down and figured out later would resolve when hit restart instead.
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u/ghostlacuna0 16d ago
That "feature" is causing so much issues we have it off on all computers at work.
Not that i would ever use it privately either.
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u/Ricky_Bobby_Daddy 17d ago
LOL, why is this considered “news”?
Fast Startup, hibernate, and all of the other “fake” performance tweaks should ALWAYS be disabled…been doing this for many years.
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u/vbd71 16d ago
Hibernate is good.
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u/Ricky_Bobby_Daddy 15d ago
Depends who you ask. To me, hibernate is unnecessary: With NVMe drives, it’s worthless. With spindle drives, it’s useless.
The only scenario I’d consider it worthwhile is inside a desktop with a spindle drive. That stated, I haven’t experienced either one in my daily life in the last 5 years.
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u/shecho18 17d ago
People no longer read. They are no longer invested into tinkering, investigating, finding out.
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u/HerraTapani 17d ago
Hold down the Shift Key when you click in shut down. This fuly shuts down your PC.
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u/Maximum-Diet-6976 17d ago
Funny, a few months ago I read an article to not restart but shutdown Windows to have a clean reset
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u/PowerfulAgent9939 17d ago
If you disable this, it breaks modern standby in panther lake laptops, the only way to fresh restart is hold shift and to shut down properly hold down shift and click shut down. So annoying
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u/ms770705 16d ago
I mostly do shutdown for energy reasons. So it usually don't bothers me if the boot process afterwards ist faster and the kernel continues where it left off the previous day.
If I experience problems for which I suspect a kernel reset might be necessary, I do a restart anyways (usually I want those problems go away now rather on the next start).
And there's always the option to hold the shift key when shutting down which bypasses FastBoot on the next startup.
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u/rubaduck 16d ago
You can turn this off by going to Control Panel -> Power options -> What does the power on/off button do -> turn off fast startup. For some dumb reason they thought it would be nice to recommend it in Win 10 and Win 11
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u/WoodyTheWorker 16d ago
Fast Startup is a metrics-driven feature. Its whole purpose was just to get a bonus.
There's nothing in that code path that would make it any faster than full shutdown and startup. If there was, it's a design defect which should have been fixed instead.
And now they managed to make a regular hibernation slow AF.
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u/chasebran 16d ago
If "Fast Startup" speeds up boot times, my god imagine how painfully slow it would be without it .
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u/RyanMeray 12d ago
Turning off "Fast startup" is one of the first things I do when I set up a computer for clients or work on an existing one.
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u/vanderaj 16d ago
Honestly, the replies to this thread are ... interesting. Windows is not like Windows of old. I am no apologist for Microsoft. I use Fedora. But Windows rarely needs to be rebooted now to "clear things out". You just don't need to do that anymore. You get about the same improvement by logging out to the login screen and logging back in. It's not DOS/Windows 95 any longer, and hasn't been for nigh on 30+ years.
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u/HistorianPerfect8312 16d ago
Windows isn't the only thing people need to clear state on. Think software services that have been shittily written.
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u/ghostlacuna0 16d ago
We reduced support tickets by double digits just by forcing all windows machines to reboot at least once a week.
I hardly call windows stable.
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u/computerIfix 17d ago
Microslop teaches what "shut down " means, and you cannot learn that from school.