What Is Fast Startup In Windows 8 & How To Disable It

When you shutdown your computer, power from its components, such as CPU, RAM, CD-Rom, and hard disk is removed in a controlled manner. As opposed to plugging the power cable out, or a power outage, during the shutdown process, Windows closes all the open applications one by one and turns off the system in the end. When you boot the computer, it starts in a refreshed state. You can customize your system to a great extent using default options, as well as third party applications. The local group policy editor is one such built-in set of parameters that allows you to control the behavior of your system. Many of these changes require you to restart your system in order to apply them. Windows 8 includes a lot of new features and one of these is Fast Startup. It is a newly introduced setting that enables your computer to start faster than normal by saving system information to a file during shutdown. The system information includes caching the registry, and saving many system files. Since this setting is enabled by default, in this post, we will explain how to disable and enable it, and when is it required to perform a complete reboot.

System wide changes mostly require you to restart the system. This includes the whole process of closing all applications, shutting down the system, powering it back on and rebooting everything from scratch. Sometimes, when you have to restart the computer to apply a change, you decide to shut it down if you have to go somewhere. If Fast Startup is turned on, the shutdown and reboot will not apply the new settings. Since the system information is saved and loaded from a file, every change that requires a complete cold reboot is not applied. To avoid this, you can turn off the Fast Startup in Windows’ settings.

To turn it off, open start screen and enter Power Options. Click Settings tab in the right side and select, Change what the power buttons do from the left side.

Once the System Settings window is open, scroll down to the Shutdown settings section and uncheck the Turn on fast startup option.

If the Shutdown settings options are greyed out, scroll back up the window and click the Change settings that are currently unavailable option to be able to change them. Click Save changes button at the bottom to confirm the selection.

From now on, Fast Startup will be disabled and Windows will start as normal.

While the implication of turning off Fast Startup might manifest in shape of longer boot times, it may not matter to most with high-end machines. In all fairness, you may not even want to turn it off at all, since even with the default settings, you can always opt for reboot when you need a refresh of the system settings.