By the way, I
strongly suggest that Fast Startup be turned OFF as one of the first things you do on any Windows 10 system. Particularly if you have a system with an SSD where it has as close to zero effect as can be.
If one is frequently shutting one's system down, each time the hiberfile.sys file gets written out as part of the process when Fast Startup is on. Eventually, and it always seems to happen eventually, there will be some sort of corruption that creeps in, and once that happens your system can become problematic when the file is reloaded and Windows "burps" on the corrupt part of the system state when it needs to access that data. I have had some of the most difficult to diagnose problems I've ever encountered that were eventually traced to corruption in the system hibernation file.
Hibernation (whether full or of the partial "fast startup" variety) is fine to use ever once in a while or if you're someone who does relatively frequent Restarts, as a Restart forces Windows to reload completely from scratch. But Fast Startup, if one does not use Restart, creates a situation where you're doing a partial hibernation again and again and again in a semi-perpetual loop. This never ends well.
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To turn Fast Start off, do the following:
- Open Control Panel then select Power Options. This is presuming that you’re using the classic “Small Icons” view in Control Panel. If not, navigate to the “View by” control and select “Small Icons,” then navigate to Power Options.
- Activate the Choose what the power button does link on the left side of the dialog.
- In the dialog just opened, activate Change settings that are currently unavailable link.
- Scroll down to the Shutdown settings section.
- Remove the check mark from the Turn on Fast Startup (Recommended) checkbox.
- Select the Save Changes Button.
Additional Information
Another name for the Fast Startup is
Hybrid Boot.
With a full shutdown everything is closed and nothing is saved.
When the Fast Startup is enabled and the computer is shut down, the
User Session is closed, but the
Kernel Session is
Hibernated. You are not doing a full shutdown, but a partial shutdown and partial hibernation.
From a Microsoft Forum discussion regarding Fast Startup:
“Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk.
If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).”