This new feature in the Fall Creators Update is taking many by surprise…
If you’ve got the Fall Creators Update on your Windows 10 PC, then you’ve probably noticed a new feature that Microsoft is calling “Fast Startup.” The feature claims to improve the speed of your boot times, so you spend less time waiting on your PC to boot and more time working, being productive. Windows has this feature enabled by default, so if you’re using the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, then, you’re likely booting faster than you were before, and have likely noticed it.
Most users will like the faster booting times, but there are a few things about it that you should know so you can decide if you want to disable it or not. Understanding how it works, is going to go a long way to getting you to this decision.
Normally, when you shut your PC down, you do what many call a “cold shutdown.” Here, you save everything to your hard drive or SSD, close all the programs and kill the power. RAM is cleared. When you turn the PC back on, it loads everything back on the drive BACK into RAM in order for it to function as intended. That’s the way everyone is used to having “shut down” work on their PC.
When users have Fast Startup enabled, the computer doesn’t shut down, per se. It really hibernates instead.
Fast Startup saves all of your active data to a hibernation file before turning off. When you turn it back on, it reads in the hibernation file, putting you back to where you were before it shut down. Interestingly enough, Fast Startup can only be enabled if your PC has the ability to hibernate, AND then only if hibernation is enabled.
So, this brings you up and down quicker. That’s good right? Right?
Well… not always. There are some times when you really might want it disabled.
Drivers…
Drivers are a GREAT reason why disabling features like Fast Startup are a good idea. Windows system drivers are historically known for being picky about how they are accessed. Windows has always had issues with power and power management, and some system level drives simply don’t like being accessed after being in a hibernated state. They may not flush out of RAM correctly. They may not initialize into RAM correctly from hibernation. They may really want to be loaded and/ or reloaded upon hardware startup in order to function correctly. When they don’t get initialized right, depending on how they access RAM or what portions of RAM they live in and access, they can either make the PC unstable, OR they can crash the entire PC.
Boot loaders are another GREAT reason why you may want to disable Fast Startup. Some boot loaders don’t get accessed correctly from a hibernated state, as the Fast Startup and hibernation in general has a tendency to want to lock the hard drive. When you want to boot into a different operating system, you may find that they only way you can reliably do this is to reboot the PC after “resuming” via Fast Startup, as you can’t access the boot loader choice for additional operating systems upon startup.
That extra restart WILL do a cold restart, by the way; so if you’re ever updating the operating system, or doing some kind of activity that really requires you to go “all the way down,” having Fast Startup enabled doesn’t prevent you from swapping out locked system files (or files that are in use) after Windows Update updates your PC.
So should you ALWAYS disable Fast Startup? Signs point to, “no.”
If things work ok for you… if you don’t have driver issues, problems or errors, you should be ok. You can keep it enabled and enjoy the faster booting times. You have to keep in mind, though, that if you want access to your hard drive from outside windows, you likely won’t be able to get that access with the feature enabled.
If you’re noticing that you get BSoD’s or you start having issues with devices not working or spinning up correctly; or if things don’t work without an extra restart, then yeah. You may want to consider disabling Fast Startup. Doing this is really pretty easy.
Ok… so how do I enable or disable Fast Startup on Windows 10’s Fall Creators Update?
If you wish to disable Fast Startup, follow these simple steps:
1. On the Desktop, press Win-X.
2. Choose Power Options from the context menu that appears.
3. Choose Power & sleep on the left side menu.
4. Under Related Settings, click the Additional power settings link.
5. On the left side of the Power Options window that appears, click the, “Choose what the power button does” link.
6. On the Power Options – System Settings window that appears, if you see an Admin Link for Change settings that are currently unavailable, click it.
7. The three check boxes under Shutdown Settings should enable. Uncheck the Turn on fast startup (recommended) check box.
If you don’t see a check box for fast startup, it’s because hibernation has somehow become disable on your PC. Renabling this is actually a lot easier than turning Fast Startup on or off.
To enable hibernation on your PC, follow these steps:
1. On the Desktop, press Win-X.
2. Choose Command Prompt (Administrator) from the context menu that appears.
3. In the Command Prompt window, type the following:
powercfg –h /on
and press enter
If you need to need to disable Fast Startup, you can follow the steps in the above section, now.
At this point, you will notice that it takes your PC a bit longer to start up. This may be an issue for you in the long run; but as they say, slow and steady wins the race. Any driver issues you have, should be gone. Any update issues you have, should certainly be gone.
Was Fast Startup an issue for you? Did you have a need or desire to disable it? If so, I’d love to hear from you. Why don’t you meet me in the Discussion area, below and let me know what you did.
The post Disable Fast Startup in Windows 10 appeared first on Soft32 Blog.
This new feature in the Fall Creators Update is taking many by surprise… If you’ve got the Fall Creators Update on your Windows 10 PC, then you’ve probably noticed a new feature that Microsoft is calling “Fast Startup.” The feature claims to improve the speed of your boot times, so you spend less time waiting […]
The post Disable Fast Startup in Windows 10 appeared first on Soft32 Blog.
2017-12-22T08:05:27.000Z[Collection]https://www.soft32.com/blog/platforms/windows/disable-fast-startup-windows-10/#respond
No comments: