Disable Fast Startup to Make Windows 10 Shut Down for Real
It sounds strange, but when you press the power button on the Start menu to shut down Windows 10, you are not shutting down Windows 10. Of course, Windows 10 does a shutdown action. And your computer looks like it has shut down. It did, but it didn’t.
This is an old Windows 10 quirk, but it’s worth highlighting from time to time in case you’ve forgotten that “shutting down” isn’t actually “shutting down.” In fact, when you turn off your computer, you put it into a hybrid state, with the ” quick start ” feature enabled by default in Windows 10 settings. As Windows Central describes:
“When Fast Startup is enabled, choosing to turn off your computer may look like you are shutting it down completely, but in reality your computer is in a mixed state between shutdown and hibernation. Indeed, a hibernation file is used, although it is smaller than usual. Why? You are logged out before the file was created, meaning your session is not being recorded. The speed boost comes from keeping the Windows kernel on your hard drive and loading at boot. “
Why shut down your computer?
There is nothing wrong with the Windows 10 Fast Startup feature. Depending on your system configuration, it may well and quickly get you back into the operating system when you “turn on” your computer.
However, there are times when you might need to shut down the system for real – for example, if you are having a strange problem with Windows. As How-To Geek points out, a standard shutdown may not be enough to stop Windows from worrying about these funny moments:
“We have personally encountered this problem. When we ran into strange system problems that could be caused by driver bugs or other low-level software issues, the problem persisted after we shut down our PC and booted it back up. “
You can try a quick trick – just reboot the system and the Windows kernel will be discarded instead of taking a snapshot for faster startup. But if you’d rather turn off the system for real, you have several options:
Consider disabling Fast Startup
Shut down your system as usual, pull out your favorite stopwatch app on your smartphone, and measure how long it takes for your computer to boot into Windows when you run it back up. Write down this number or just memorize it.
Now click the “Start” button, type “power”, select the “Power and sleep options” option and click “Advanced power options”. In the window that appears, click “Choose what the power buttons do” on the left sidebar and uncheck “Turn on fast startup (Recommended)”. You may need to first click Change settings that are currently unavailable to clear the Quick Launch check box.
Shut down your system again. Determine how long it takes your computer to boot Windows when the backup starts. If the difference between this number and the last number is too great, turn on Fast Startup again. If it’s just a few seconds, or an amount of time you won’t even notice with day-to-day use, you can leave Fast Startup unchecked to ensure that you always (really) shut down your computer.
Fast startup might not make any difference either. When I counted my time, I had 29 seconds from pressing a button to the lock screen with “quick start” enabled … and 27 seconds with it off. ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯
Hybrid Approach to Hybrid Stop Management
If you want to use Windows Fast Startup but still want to be able to shut down completely when you think you might need it, there are a few tricks you can try.
The easiest way is to just hold down the Shift key before clicking the power icon and choosing Shut Down from the Windows Start menu, on the Ctrl + Alt + Del screen, or on the Lock screen. This will force your system to actually shutdown your computer rather than in a hybrid fashion.
For fun, you can also shutdown your system (for real) from the command line: just type “shutdown / s / f” and hit Enter. The / s flag indicates that you want to shutdown your system, and / f indicates that you want to force close all open applications (if you add / t and a number, you can also give yourself a delay of a few seconds before your system shuts down .)
You can even make this little command a shortcut on your desktop for easier access. Right click on the Windows 10 desktop, select New and then Shortcut and enter this as the location of the shortcut: shutdown /s /f (Thanks to Lifehacker reader CmdrKeene for the note on the smaller shortcut !)
After that click Next, give the shortcut a funny name (for example, Recycle Bin) and click Finish. The next time you want to shut down your computer, just double-click the shutdown shortcut. Better yet, drag it to your toolbar for easy access (and all the fun that comes from accidentally hitting OFF when you wanted to click File Explorer).
Shutting down does not completely shutdown Windows 10 (and on reboot) | How-To Geek