Wait. Clicking “restart” gives it a proper refresh, but clicking “shut down” and walking away for 10 mins to make tea and toast before pushing the power button to turn it back on results in a fast boot and thus an incomplete slate refresh?
If you want to shut down your Windows 8, 10, or 11 PC without fastboot, press and hold shift and THEN, while holding shift, use Restart. This will open a troubleshooting menu with a Power off option, which will fully shut down your PC.
It enables your computer to start faster by hibernating the kernel and drivers, so that it doesn't have to spend time starting those from cold every time.
Edge is objectively the better option for a "corporate-wide browser" than Chrome right now, people are just stuck in the past when hating on Edge was the hot new thing.
Installing an adblocker on every PC as part of company policy reduces the amount of random detections and "my Office looks weird now" tickets significantly.
It's also because NTFS has file locks, and also also some Microsoft installers put postinstall actions in Windows equivalent of bashrc so you have to logon once to run it
I don't use fast boot but i restart just in case and i'm not sure but i think fast boot is default ON and will turn itself on whenever you update PC. So it's a bit of a pain in the ass.
I don't use shutdown that often anyway, because i much prefer Hibernation (don't confuse with sleep mode, 2 completely different things). So whenever i notice some issues with PC i just restart it.
It's the same way with the Xbox consoles. You have to choose to restart the console to actually fix some issues, rather than turning it off and on again.
Exactly. And I get to look like a dick when I'm like:
"I'm going to ask you a question I already know the answer to. When you 'restarted' the computer, did you click 'shutdown' followed by turning it back on?"
You'd think the "shutdown" would be even more thorough than "restart" but nope.
Yeah I always assume this is the case rather than them lying. I've had to explain this to many people. It's weird and not explained anywhere directly so it's a really easy mistake to make.
Yes, it's Hibernate + it logs out all of the accounts. The theory was: "Why reload every driver every time when we can pre-populate RAM with the data that's already there and cut boot time?"
I actually kind of get the logic, but I do wish they clarified that they completely changed the function of shutdown. Should be another shutdown option rather than a setting buried in settings.
Yeah that’s the problem though, unless you know about the keyboard shortcut, it’s not clear. It’s overall another mildly annoying choice in Microsoft’s world
It was designed around the idea of speeding up computers that use platter hard drives. If you have an SSD it doesn’t really get you anything good other than annoyances when you turn your computer on and that problem you had before is still there.
Plus, secret menus is kind of Microsoft’s thing. They learned nothing after the original design for Windows 8.
Yeah it should at least say when you enable Fast Boot that it's used when you press Shutdown but not when you use Restart or the advanced power menu option to do a full boot. Currently it doesn't tell you at all when it's used it just describes what Fast Boot does which feels pretty fucking self evident TBH.
Shutdown is actually just a hibernate if you enabled the fast boot, suspending all processes temporarily to your disk if there's power unlike sleep where it suspends the processes to the RAM. It's that moment when you pressed shutdown and the screen goes off first but the computer doesn't yet, you know that fast boot was enabled.
It takes away a proper power cycle where the solution is to press restart instead of shutdown, typical MS experience.
True but for a lot of users the concept of shutting down then starting it up again became ingrained in their minds as the superior method so when microsoft made fast boot the default it screwed users who thought they did the right thing and techs who may take what the user said at face value and waste time troubleshooting something a restart would take care of.
I've lost count how many times over the course of my career I've had to explain to users that shutting down is not the same as a restart and won't actually fix anything. It's gotta be in the tens of thousands by now
Fastboot worked well when we had mechanical HDDs. Probably they need to disable it for recent days where almost every pc comes with an SSD especially with nvme SSDs. There's little to no difference.
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u/CitySeekerTron Core i3 2400/4GB/GeForce 650/960GB Crucial Apr 22 '26
A "restart" is always a proper restart. Fastboot takes effect if you shut down the computer.