âFast Startupâ was added in Windows 8. Itâs on by default and applies when you boot or reboot your machine. I view it as a kind of hybrid that lands somewhere between a normal cold boot, in which everything is loaded afresh, and hibernation, in which the previous state of the machine is rapidly re-loaded from a disk image.
As I understand it, fast startup attempts to reuse some of the previous state of the machineâs last use so as not to have to reload everything from scratch. In âhibernateâ, currently running programs and the usersâ logged state is preserved, however when you shut down programs are closed and the user is logged out. However fast start can still reload much of the rest of the operating system more quickly from files saved during the shutdown.
The theory is that it saves time, and most of the time, it does.
Itâs also something worth turning off when diagnosing boot problems, because it can occasionally have other impacts.
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Turn off Fast Startup
Start in Control Panel
The settings for fast startup are buried in Control Panel.
Right-click on the Start menu and click on Control Panel.
In Control Panel, click on Power Options. (This example uses the âsmall iconsâ view of Control Panel, which you can select using the âView byâ drop-down in the upper right.)
In the Power Options dialog, click on âChoose what the power buttons doâ link on the left.
On the next screen, while the option we want â âTurn on fast startupâ â is visible, itâs also disabled. Click on Change settings that are currently unavailable to enable it.
Now you can uncheck the check box for âTurn on fast startupâ.
Fast startup is enabled by default, and unchecking it will turn it off.
Diagnosing boot problems
See if fast startup made a difference
Now that fast startup has been turned off, power down your machine completely and start it up again. Depending on the type of boot problem youâve been experiencing, see if that problem remains.
If the problem remains, you can eliminate fast boot from the suspect list. If you care to, you can revisit the steps above and turn it back on again. Or not.
If, however, the problem goes away, you have two choices:
Use that as a clue to further diagnose the problem (or as further information as you go out seeking assistance). The boot process is complex enough that the fact that turning off fast startup made things work does not tell you exactly whatâs wrong â it still could be many different things. But as I said, itâs a clue. (As I understand it, device drivers that donât fully or properly support hibernation are one of the leading suspects, but it still could be just about anything.)
OrâŠ
Live with slower boots. How much slower your boot becomes will depend on your machine and its configuration. If you can live with it, this is a very pragmatic approach to the problem, and probably the solution I would choose myself. If you care to, maybe try enabling it again after a few months in case a Windows update of some sort resolved your underlying issue.
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  Turning Off Fast Startup in Windows 10
If Bootup gets any slower, Iâll have to get up at midnight to start my machine.
Why shut it down at all? Sleeping it instead would only up your electricity bill by about $5 per year, if that.
I have my machine start up automtically. Just do that at enough time before you need it.
Do you think fast boot should be turned off and back on every once in a while for maintenance? Or does a restart (instead of shut down) clear it?
Do updates install if you are using fast boot? The other week I had to change a setting on the church computer that powers the video projector (15 minutes before the church service started). Unfortunately after changing the setting, Windows said that it needed to reboot for the setting to take effect. Clicking OK, the computer proceeded to shutdown and install updates ⊠a LOT of updates, automatic reboot, and continue installing updates. Not exactly the time I wanted to install that many updates.
Could it be that Windows has been downloading all the updates to Windows 10 but not installing them because we use the fast boot?
With Fast Restart enabled, updates that require a reboot cannot install when the system is shutdown. When such updates are ready to be installed, instead of being prompted to âShutdown and Updateâ youâre prompted to âUpdate and Restartâ (a restart is cold boot that enables the update/s to install). At least, I think thatâs how it works.
Anyway, I donât think Fast Restart caused the issue; I think you just had a lot of updates!
I was glad to see the fast startup until I deduced that if I begin to use some appsâespecially EXCELâimmediately, it frequently crashes. Many times the crash causes me to lose the document I was using completely and I have to go restore it from my backup. So I find that the risks of using the fast startup immediately are great.
Hi Leo
What is the difference between sleep and hibernate modes in win 10?
Sleep AKA standby keeps your computer on at a low energy state so that the contents of the RAM arenât deleted, making it wake up almost instantaneously. Hibernate copies the contents of RAM to the hard drive and reloads it back to RAM on startup. That takes longer as the computer has to power up and the contents of the hiberfil.sys have to be copied into RAM.
Same as itâs always been: sleep keeps RAM contents alive by using a very small amount of power. Hibernate writes the contents of RAM to disk and then turns the machine completely off.
Turning off fast startup made NumLock work as designed at bootup on some recent Dell laptop purchases.
I (and VERY MANY other people) have a problem with fast boot â it stops NUMLOCK-ON from working!!
If you scour the internet you will find gazillions of pages about this, despite trying every single registry edit I could find, the only thing that allows NUMLOCK-ON to work RELIABLY is to disable fast boot.
âJust press Numlockâ, people say â useless if you donât have keyboard lights and you have one or more numbers (recommended) in your login password.
âUse the top row of keysâ, people say â very irritating if you have several numbers in your password and you are used to using the numeric pad like I am.
Microsoft have made a RIGHT MESS of this and clearly have no intention of fixing it.
As someone else pointed out boot up is slow enough (walk away and get a coffee!!!)
It is now 4+ years into the future, and the Number Lock bug you mentioned is still a problem in Windows 10 (on my PC, at least). Fortunately, turning off Fast Startup is still a solution. Who would have known?! Thanks, Peter and Matt.
I should mention that the Number Lock âsolutionâ (by turning off Fast Startup in Windows 10) was not permanent for me. The problem went away for about a month, and then it resurfaced. The issue is intermittent once again. I canât identify a pattern as to why it fails to work sometimes. Iâll have to just live with this small inconvenience.
My PC boots faster with âFast startupâ turned off.
Good info, thanks. I have just the opposite problem. When I âShut Downâ my computer, it goes into sleep mode instead. Just taping the space bar restarts (power-on), the computer. Both my computers act the same way. I even disabled the sleep option from the proceedure above but no help. Not a major problem but a nuisance to have the machine come on if I put my mail on the keyboard.
Hi Leo,
I have an older HP Envy laptop with a fingerprint reader. The reader worked fine in Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 but after Windows 10, it became quirky. After I boot up, Windows Hello SHOULD be able to read my fingerprint but the reader wasnât active until I did a Restart and THEN the reader became active. After reading your article, I de-selected Fast Startup and wahlahhhhh! The reader works after each bootup now â no more having to do a Restart so effectively, it made my startups faster. Nice. THANK YOU!!!
I followed all and I know ho to do it too, but I never see finally FAST STARTUP. Only SLEEP and POWER OFF or SHUT DOWN.
If youâve got a multi-boot system (like me) youâll get into serious trouble when Fast Startup is enabled:
Because the system isnât completely shut down, OS like Win 7 or Xp think there is something wrong with the HDâs file structure and run chkdsk.
Which last forever, having several big disks.
Btw: after an major Win X update, Fast Startup was enabled again. So the whole mess was back on business againâŠ
Thatâs a rather round-about way of getting where you suggest users go to turn off fast start.
Simply right click the start button, click on âPower Optionsâ, and click on âChoose what the power buttons doâ. Control Panel shouldnât enter into this at all.
Leo I have a problem but I donât know how to fix it, it is my cd/dvd player, I could play dvdâs at one time but now it will not play any dvdâs. It has a media function although I do not have any music stored on it. I mostly want to eighter play dvdâs or try to burn them and again I donât know how to burn or record dvdâs or cdâs. I would like some help with this or if you cannot help me would you recommend a book that I can learn how to do this. I would get it from you if you had it available as you are the only person that has offered to help people like myself who are lost and does not have the expertise to solve problems like this. Will keep my eye open to hear from you as soon as possible, thanks.
If it used to work and now does not, Iâd have to know exactly HOW it fails where it didnât used to.
FAST STARTUP IS SLOW! Iâve been having slow startups since downloading the free W10 system over a satisfactorily working W7 system. It started, went to blue screen, then restarted. All this took about eight minutes! Only when I read this article and disabled âFast Startupâ did it startup in under two minutes with no problems with blue screen. Going back to âFast Startupâ mode, it did the blue screen nonsense again taking about eight minutes! THANKS FOR THIS ARTICLE!!!!
I had a problem with internet settings on a Win 10 desktop. I shutdown and started again. It didnât help. I called my ISP and he had me restart. It fixed the problem. I thought shutdown and restart did the same thing. I was wrong.
Yes they are. For most practical purposes and in that case, a restart is simply a shutdown and restart. Sometimes a second restart works after a previous restart fails.
I was frequently getting BSOD when starting my HP desktop (Win 10 with âanniversaryâ update). The hard drive light would flicker briefly then stay off. Iâd eventually hold down the power button to force shutdown, after which it booted up normally. Thought it was possibly a flaky boot sector. Tried CHKDSK but it did not help. Considered getting SpinRite but with drives so cheap I ordered a 1TB âgamerâ HDâŠand made sure my full image backup stayed up to date! Before the HD arrived I read this article and unchecked Fast Startup. End of problem! Oh, well. Plan to go ahead and install the new HD anyway, as it has better specs than the factory drive, now 4 years old.
On our Win10 system, a power down resulted in automatic reboot. This was fixed by turning off fast startup as described in the article. This issue also occurred on the same hardware when we were running Win7 Pro, prior to Microsoftâs invasion of our system by upgrading to Win10.
Iâve always been under the impression that having too many items on the desktop was a major factor in slow bootups. Is this not the case?
This is not the case. The amount of stuff on your desktop has very little impact on speed.