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Fast startup in Windows 10 is designed to boot the system quickly and cleanly, lowering the wait time considerably before the login screen. While all well and good, having it enabled prevents a full shutdown of Windows, often necessary for a full memory flush or installation of patches. That may or may not work for you. If you want to turn on/off fast startup in Windows 10, read on!
Fast startup is a great idea in theory as it holds the machine state in memory like hibernation but with the power saving of a shutdown. As usual, the reality is a little different. Fast startup interferes with encrypted drives, can prevent patches from installing correctly, can lock down the hard drive and can even prevent you accessing your UEFI settings on a full reboot.
But it does work sometimes so it’s worth experimenting to see how it behaves on your machine.
Turn on fast startup in Windows 10
For fast startup to work, hibernate must be supported and enabled on your machine.
1. Type or paste ‘CMD’ into the Search Windows box.
2. Type or paste ‘powercfg /hibernate on’ to ensure Hibernate mode is enabled.
3. Navigate to Control Panel, System and Security and then Power Options.
4. Select ‘Choose what the power buttons do’.
5. Click the ‘Change settings that are currently unavailable’ text link.
6. Find ‘Shut-down settings’ and find ‘Turn on fast startup’. Select to turn on.
Turn off fast startup in Windows 10
If you find fast startup causes problems or you no longer need it, you can just reverse the above steps to turn it off.
1. Navigate to Control Panel, System and Security and then Power Options.
2. Select ‘Choose what the power buttons do’.
3. Click the ‘Change settings that are currently unavailable’ text link.
4. Find ‘Shut-down settings’ and find ‘Turn on fast startup’. Select to turn off.
Optimizing Windows 10? Try these:
How to get into advanced startup options in Windows 10
Quick guide to optimizing Windows 10
How to optimize boot performance of Windows 10
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