Fast startup - Enable or disable? (Read)

[MonstrousOgre]

So I've got a laptop that I've had for 5 years now. It came with Windows 7 but I manually installed Windows 10 on it. I had to enable fast startup because it would take too long to startup otherwise. It wouldn't let me access the BIOS but I could restart whenever I needed to do that, since restart isn't affected by fast boot.

I recently built a desktop though, which I've been using for over a month. I wanted to see whether you could enter the BIOS for this with fast boot enabled. I tried it and I was able to. That caused one problem though.

The next time I logged into Windows, 2 of my startup programs crashed immediately and kept crashing no matter how many times I started them manually. The same happened to another program that I tried to open later. This only happened to some programs though.

I tried shutting it down and starting it up again but the same thing happened each time. But then I remembered that fast startup actually saves some of the data in a file to use next time you boot. So I hit restart instead of shut down this time and the problem was solved. I was also able to shut down multiple times after this and none of the programs crashed.

I tried reproducing this issue by entering the bios with fast startup enabled, and it seemed to work.

Now unlike my laptop, my desktop boots up really fast even with it disabled. I don't even notice the difference and even if there is one, it's probably less than 5 seconds. And they literally have the same startup programs installed. I know I won't face this problem on my laptop since I can't use the BIOS during fast boot anyway.

So my question is

1. Should I just disable fast boot on my desktop? Is there any advantage to having it enabled other than the startup time (which I don't even notice)?
2. Should I disable it from Windows or my BIOS? I have the option in both places.

I also might plan to dual boot along with Linux in the future.

 

[BFG-9000]

I disable fast startup on desktops with a SSD because i change hardware frequently and this results in a BSOD on fast startup as the hardware it expects is gone.

Windows' fast startup is nothing more than hibernate after logging you off first. If I had wanted to hibernate, I'd want to keep all of my open windows too so fast startup just gives a non-clean boot without the convenience of picking up where you left off. A poor tradeoff to save a few seconds on bootup.

Note that Windows 10 Hybrid Sleep is both sleep and hibernate. It usually resumes from sleep unless power is lost, and only then does it resume from hibernate. On a desktop you should usually just use that, and for obvious reasons it's not default for laptops (it would drain the battery every time and then slowly resume from hibernation anyway).

BTW the fast start setting in the BIOS is completely different from the one in Windows--that one skips some of the normal POST checks once you know your hardware is working properly at its current settings.

 

[Colif]

1. don't need it on if you have ssd, as above. It also messed with drivers not written to cope with the way win 10 loads with it on.

2. Fast startup in BIOS is likely just a way to have bios ignore all USB except mouse/kb at boot, not related to the windows process.
Fast startup in windows uses the hiberfile.sys to save a copy of kernel and drivers into ram to speed up startup
Here is how to disable it in windows - https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4189-turn-off-fast-startup-windows-10-a.html

 

[MonstrousOgre]

I do have an SSD, so I guess I won't need it. Thanks both of you