You're Doing it Wrong: Rebooting! Find out why! 

Go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options\System Settings and untick "Turn on fast startup.." That means no more fake shutdown, slightly slower boot time.

I find very little difference, so might as well do the full boot

Actually, there's a CMD console command that used to do all that. For instance, to turn off hibernate completely, you would use the command "powercfg -h off", and you would use "on" to re-enable it... Of course, I'm not 100% percent sure if that's something that's still available in windows or not in windows 10 and 11, aside from the fact that it APPEARS to work on my windows 10 system

Powercfg /h off

Pro-tip. if you dual boot, or plan to image the hard drive, **always** do this. Otherwise the filesystem will likely not be in a clean state.

Seconded on that. PCs have gotten wildly complex now. One of the things that has always frustrated me is the way that graphics on UNIX is such a s***show so it becomes actually quite difficult to do something like a perfectly clean boot with a simple logo all the way from BIOS to finished boot without the graphics flicking in an out. For instance on NetBSD version 7 they brought in DRM graphics from Linux and the way they did it doesn't really play that nice with the existing framework, it just seems to take over so the system would start in text mode then half way through suddenly jump into hi res DRM mode. And you often see a lot of Linux distros jumping around between a boot logo and then crap being spat out from the kernel to the console etc, screen flickering as it switches modes etc. Seamless boot is quite tricky to pull off it seems. Doesn't help that the freedesktop people aren't exactly the most transparent bunch of people and that PC graphics is still such a dark art. I once tried to fix a screen brightness support issue on NetBSD and ended up going through the kernel code for like ACPIVGA, DRM, wscons framework etc and it seemed such a god damn mess, it was like some Kafka nightmare. In the end I found an extremely dirty hack which just involved writing a PCI register that let me control brightness on my particular system but it turned out to be a VERY dangerous method. It worked on one laptop just fine but when I tried it on it on another laptop I couldn't get screen brightness working on it appeared to damage the LED PWM driver and the backlight would flicker badly for a few minutes every time you started it up.. god knows what I did but it did some actual damage!

didn't they teach you that in school?

@@kingjames4886 I don't think what I learned about PCs booting up 20 years ago in school has much relevance today.

@@treborrrrr it's not reeeally all that different

To the person pushing a button to turn on a magic box, no. To a person writing a startup driver to make your magic box work, yes. It's not really a good reason to stop learning either way.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Me too. Even brought it up to my fellow IT support engineers

A couple of enterprises I work with have all-SSD machines and they globally disable fast startup. The difference in boot time isn't worth the "What do you mean I don't reboot, I shut down every night" support cases.

Rofstyx4 - in my PC, W11Pro, the checkbox you refer to is greyed out and connot be unchecked.

@@davybloggs1564 Near the top of that window there should be a UAC icon next to the sentence "Change settings that are currently unavailable" clicking on that should unlock the checkbox, but you may need administrator access for it to work. I am using win10.

@@RofStyx4 Thanks

Can't seem to find it on my Win10.

Changes what the power buttons do; there is a checkbox for turn ON There is a difference in meaning between ON OFF and on off that people do not realize and are not taught by the corrupt education system Neither do the people actually notice - even when it is in plain sight - as the people 'have been turned into ZOMBIES ON OFF ( in the ALL CAPS ) relates to switching - - such as Turn the Light ON = or the Computer refuses to turn OFF { IT is also marked that way on switches - - so pay attention to detail ) on off is used in a different context: Such as - I start work on Monday and I am off on the week-end So learn it and reach it to others who are ignorant of this difference And remember - pay attention to detail - Male sure the brain sees exactly what the eyes are looking at Such as HOLLYWOOD and not Hollywood It is written on a Huge sign yet ZOMBIES cannot see it. ZOMBIES have eyes but cannot see - ears and cannot hear

MOrnetc - In my W11 Pro PC, pressing alt + F4 just closes my browser! Please be more specific in your explanations re key presses.

@@davybloggs1564 - I have not upgraded to W11. I rely on desktop Linux as my primary OS. I keep a W10 partition only as a test platform. btw- _MorningStar_ is what I intended with my YT_ID.

@@davybloggs1564 - Actually, I am quite sleep deprived. Alt+F4 will close any _application_ (i.e. active window) in Windows 10, also. I do not have W10 loaded at the moment, but I believe that selecting the _desktop_ (i.e. left-click on desktop wallpaper) will place focus on the operating system for Alt+F4; else, closing all windows and then pressing Alt+F4. Not certain --- I always close all apps _before_ I attempt to shutdown/restart.

I prefer Win+X to get the power context menu, then getting the shutdown/restart options from there, a bit cleaner than getting focus on the desktop then Alt+F4ing. I suppose you could Win+D to get the desktop first but the Win+X menu seems more reliable to me.

@@ChristopherWoods - I prefer to close all open apps, one-by-one, first. Alt+F4 works well for that.

That also lets you enable the hibernation option, which is occasionally useful without automatically using it every time.

Same here, I've always found it boots FASTER on an SSD with Fast Start disabled, it was designed to speed up loading from HDD and is detrimental on SSDs.

Raid arrays boot terribly slow. Fast boot doesn't matter to me because saving seconds on a 30 plus second boot isn't too impactful but I still leave fast boot on. I don't experience bluescreens or errors so there's no problems for me. So people reading this should probably opt to try it before disabling it. I use a lot of systems the newest being a 12900k/samsung 980pro Windows 11 based system and the oldest being a dual core from 2007 running 8.1 that runs media center, and machines in between 2007-2022

@@alexatkin And Fast Start Boot may cause problems when booting into another OS (if you use Windows and Linux on the same machine). As Windows with Fast Boot enabled stores the state of the NTFS partitions in the hybernation file and restores it on the next start, it may interfere with changes to that partitions from Linux (or any other OS). The worst case would be data loss.

I use ultra fast boot and i have never had a blue screen and im on the insider build. So i think thats more a fallacy.

When he gets to 640k then he wins. 640k should be enough for anyone!

@@amcadam26 Done.

watch out everyone, a "true geek" has graced us with their presence lol

Nonono...they know this, but they still wanted faster boots! The goals were (as I recall) initially to get boot times down under 30 seconds, and then down under 10 seconds. So, full BIOS POST was ditched via "fast-boot" to reduce that initial 10-15 seconds of hardware verification by BIOS. Some of the shenanigans that were being pulled in this race to the bottom were ridiculous. And the canned response any time something Went Wrong was, just do a full boot. It was enough to make those of us in OS Test just want to pull out what little hair we had left.

@@Ughmahedhurtz Good thing the memory training times of DDR5 completely undid most of that effort spent on reducing boot times, haha. Well, on AM5 systems, anyway. The situation with Intel systems may be different, idk.

@@aaronjenkins9573 Memory (re)training is only one part of this, though. Granted, if it's taking stupid amounts of time on some systems, that's a problem. Funny thing is, my current systems where I run dual NVME SSDs in RAID-0 take much, MUCH less time to load the OS from scratch than the BIOS does to boot/detect/handoff. I haven't seen any of this retraining time BS on DDR4. Hopefully by the time I upgrade my 3900X to a 8950X, they'll have all that figured out.

Reading data from the SSD isn't the only thing that happens on boot. Your computer still has to process a lot of things before it can get into a usable state. And depending on how many things you want to have started up, this can still create a significant boot time. By packing away things that don't really need to be restarted from scratch and only need their state saved, you can still shave off a lot of time that way. You just load it back into memory and hit go.

@@Ughmahedhurtz which is very ironic when you have a 1.5GB/s M2 SSD capable of booting the system from cold boot in 5sec, which is faster than all that complex code running and doing a lot of shite . "Fast-Boot", more like complex-boot. I basically always disable it, with hibernation too, and I disable all the power saving extra states that only serve to throttle the throughput of the CPU when you need it. You know when you have a car and hit the pedal to the bottom, and it gasps, that's what I feel when I use stupid power saving states and speed-step or whatever Intel call that misfeature. I fucking don't want to save power, I want to have faster computer, if it uses 800W I literally don't care, I paid for it, and I want to use 100% of it all the time forever, until the planet becomes a death ball of global warming effects or until the heat death of the universe. To be fair, the system only uses 70W when doing nothing, which is very acceptable, its like leaving a incandescent lamp bulb on. It uses less power than my A/C unit which is always on and uses much more power than that.

Throwing the big red toggle switch in the back from 1 to 0 pretty much does the same thing. If you don't trust that, you could use a powerstrip with a switch on it too. Pulling the cord is not necessary, and has a slight chance of causing other issues, because of the loss of grounding, and possible sparking.

@@joesterling4299 It may surprise you but not every power supply has an off switch and and the one I have is black. Cheap chords have switches without dampening and bad design which can spark worse then pulling the cord.

Good to know. Thanks.

You can also hold down shift when you click shutdown to do a 'shutdown -s'

Huh, thanks for the Shift+Shut Down tip :)

I always keep a batch file on desktop to "shutdown -s -f -t0" to save any messing around

@@TheVicar i always use shutdown -r -f -t 0

I have seen FreeBSD boxes going without reboot for 7+ years...

@@MrIlovesubaru A good system administrator can use Linux or BSD for years without reboot.

@@anon_y_mousse My most recent reboots have been due to hardware failure or moving the computers without UPS.

@@cigmorfil4101 I've got UPS's on all of my equipment too. Definitely a good idea.

If Xcode has a memory leak closing it and reopening should fix it unless there's something I'm missing. Worst case logging off and logging back in would probably help if there are background components you can't normally close. If rebooting was the only fix for a memory leak it _must_ be an OS fault.

Indeed, and the time it saves on boot (I can't tell tbh, can't imagine it being more then one or two seconds if that) on new pc's is thus negligible, like I'd guess my pc "slow" boots in five or six seconds or something, like what are we talking about, what does a second faster accomplish when it's already that fast to begin with? Not worth the trouble imo.

Regarding point 2, I believe it _isn't_ properly unmounted even though it's fully consistent. The FS driver in Windows probably has some state stored in "RAM" and if the actual state is changed under it bad things could happen. Having said that it _is_ very annoying.

In my older setups I also used to disable lid sleep, partly because that's what I was used to from my Win98 and older laptops. It's easy to press a Fn-key combo every time when you want it to actually sleep but much more of a nuisance recovering from an unwanted sleep. I feel the need to ask you, why don't you use sleep instead of hibernate when you're making your wiring changes?

@@eDoc2020 Understand. As far as why hibernate? Most of the projects I work on are complex. The wiring changes often need hours to accomplish, including research of multiple vendor package wiring diagrams and control philosophy documents. I have got into the habit of using hibernation mode while not programming, and don't have access to power. No real reason, I guess, other than it saves the battery.

@@davida1hiwaaynet I guessed the changes would be quick. If the changes take hours to accomplish then hibernate does make much more sense.

I think you mean Win2k. I might be wrong.

Pretty sure Fast Boot in the Bios refers to the POST sequence and not the actual Windows booting process he's discussing where Windows itself loads from the hibernation file.

you need to disable more in the power settings area of control panel/settings and look at "Change what the power buttons do"

Yes. More than once to get all the content transfer to my memory.

That story may be a “back etymology,” since not all computers in the “old days” used paper tape. The Digital PDP-5 used papertape but the “boot” was entered using the panel switches (IIRC, 7 12-bit words), which then allowed a full papertape program to be loaded. Most IBM computers before the 360 had a separate LOAD button on the card reader, and/or each magnetic tape drive. The 360 allowed booting from any device, usually an installed operating system, by dialing the device address into a set of switches and pressing the LOAD button next to them (but IBM always called it Initial Program Load, or IPL, from the 360 onward). So I would go with the “pull yourself up” theory, especially since an operating system had to open files before the full file open/close software was loaded, read JCL to set up the JCL reader and initiator tasks, etc, requiring partial function duplication in different programs.

In a comp sci class in the 70s I was told it was from "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". There were also some old cartoons that played on this trope of being able to pull yourself off the ground by grabbing your shoe laces. It's an old joke.

"Bootstrapping" is the term for a self-starting process in multiple fields, it's the self-starting part that is the common root, not anything computer-related. That comes from the pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps saying. (Which itself is derived from other earlier sayings.)

Clickbait as expected. Sigh.

@@NatoBoram damn it, we got free information from someone who helped build the operating system we* are using

When you turn on your computer, you generally want to start work as quickly as possible.

Also, keep in mind that Windows 8 was designed for touch screens and tablets. People compare those boot times with ones from iPads and Android Tablets.

@@_nikeee iPad actually takes forever to reboot, but you only do that when updating iPadOS. The rest of the time it is just on sleep mode and it takes however long it takes to turn the screen back on.

@@katbryce Yeah, that comparison would be useless nonetheless. However, people would still do it. Booting Windows on iPad-like hardware at the time would have taken considerably longer without those optimizations.

It's supposed to make shutting down and starting up again go faster. But on modern PCs it's probably hardly worth it.

That's what I liked about it. I'm very technical, so I know what the different options are. But this video casually gets into where these options make the most sense, and what to expect (boot time, power consumption, hard drive grinding, etc) with each of the optons. Pretty thorough presentation.

obsolete punch card system? You implying they don't make 029 keypunch machines anymore? That means no chads for the ticker tape parade. (where did that memory come from? Chads?) More humor about the computer having a crank on the side. 1974 BSCS @darrenlesage2420

An old story, and an amazing movie

Münchhausen pulled himself out on his own hair. At least that was one of his tales. No bootstraps. Maybe the story got changed from the original while moving around the world?

I thought it was a cowboy reference.

No, Dave's explanation is correct. If Wikipedia says otherwise, consider the source.

​@@whocares281 it's his "pigtails" specifically.

Back when Macs had hard drives I replaced the HDDs for a couple of my friends because they were doing exactly this. Now, with SSDs, it's probably not so much an issue.

Not everyone has SSDs for storage, especially laptops where if you want a less expensive one to have 1TB, it will be mechanical. If you want SSD but less expensive laptop, you get 120GB

@@danman32 I hate fast startup with a passion, with mech drives my experience from clients is that you needed 8gb ram even at windows 8 times, otherwise fast startup would bog down your PC with them missing reboot, it would also expose driver issues more often and after that it would require a real reboot. One of the first things I check when someone calls me for issues is the task manager wake timer, if it's more than 15 days is most likely that pc needs a real reboot plus disable the fast startup

It's beneficial because of WoL.

@@MrCrashDavi It might not be because even though the kernel is saved to disk, it is still considered in a shutdown state. For WOL to work, it had to be in sleep or hibernate state.

It is not the same speed. Hibernation is indeed faster, as it only loads from disk to memory, without the need of processing. I've loved that fast boot feature, even though I have always hibernated since XP, because it was blindly fast back then compared to cold booting.

Kind of funny, and quite predictable, that they made what was traditionally the safer option the one that performs worse.

@@anon_y_mousse While that is true, it’s also true that at the same time they did this, almost no one noticed, because they made it that much more reliable (although still not perfect).

@@babybirdhome Still not as reliable as a well maintained Linux system.

THIS x1024

Exactly what we found. When I replaced everyone's machines a few years back we got some back that had uptime of months. And users do not know the difference between a shutdown and a restart. so even when you ask them to restart they don't and then you end up with a system with 90 days uptime and you can't convince them that they did the wrong thing. A quick disable of fast boot and hybrid sleep in group policy and we reduced our random error tickets by about 75%

@@adamgeorge8327 I find an alarming number of users will restart the computer by pressing the power button on the monitor, even in out computer science department

@@denvera1g1 With my first PC, the IBM PS/1 (model 2??? - the question marks being numbers I don't remember right now, but it was a 286), that was actually the proper way ;) It only had a power button in monitor and the monitor VGA and power cables to the PC itself. The PC had no power button :) It would have prevented anyone without some tech savvy from replacing the monitor with some generic VGA monitor and have it working... There would've been no way to boot up the system. Though the power connector on the PC was probably just a standard 3-prong connector, so it shouldn't have been that hard to get it powered up anyway. Just thought I'd mention.

@@denvera1g1 There are times where you have to use the power button (though you hold it rather than just pushing it). I always run an actual restart after that though.

@@karlrovey I still have the power button connected electrically, but group policy disables the windows power button/lid close action. However the BIOS will still normally cut power from the device after 4-15 seconds depending on the model. We have a group of laptops for a VR class that shutdown after 15 seconds of holding down the power button, i've never seen a machine take longer than 5 seconds before then, and if i didnt have more than one laptop i'd say the power button was defective and never would have held it for longer. The weird thing is that after 5 seconds of holding down the power button, Windows shows this "swipe up to shut down" option, which 1: i dont want to do because you're acting up and i just want to re-image you, and 2: i cant do because this isnt the touch screen version.

Linux is not forbidden here. Amiga rules. Windows is just for gaming ;)

As a Puppy Slacko user I now recall my Windows days as like holding a very valuable thin crystal wine-glass that I could easily crush in my puny fist and therefore a constant worry that It would break. Using Slacko is like having a shipping container of restaurant-grade tumblers at my disposal.

Only maybe 10 days ago I set this up on my Linux desktop. It was a 2 step process, enabling in the BIOS and using the set option in Ethtool to enable, that apparently can get overwritten on restart so also make it an option in Network Management to respect the 'magic packet'

@@airjuri 'Tell Max , Amiga rules'

it is still in the adapter options in device manager. And BIOS also often needs to be setup for it.

I'm pretty confident it flushes the disk caches, but not much more!

He already said in the video that a warm boot NEVER clears the memory, that particular problem was obvious somewhere else in the computer not clearing it correctly once its been allocated for use. Also older computers being so slow, you would often see the last content of the video memory on screen for a second before it cleared it, even from a cold boot if you powered back on too quickly. I remember back on the Amiga, you could use a soft boot to rip sound samples from the game you had just been playing.

@@alexatkin He said warm boot doesn't _test_ the memory. I haven't tested but I suspect modern PCs will still _clear_ memory on warm boot entry for security reasons as it only takes a fraction of a second.

Even now a cold boot is not guaranteed to clear your memory, ultimately that is a BIOS question whether it runs the memory check which writes a 0 to every location. There is a cold boot attack method to grab full disk encryption keys out of memory from the last OS is running. One has to be relatively quick between power loss and fresh power to the ram modules, liquid nitrogen can extend the time to hours to days for this persistence.

shutdown -r works well, if you need to reboot from an RDP session...

@@tekvax01 Throwing down a “shutdown -s” fresh out of muscle memory instead of “shutdown -r” was always an interesting situation on remote sessions!

@@WilliamHaisch You subconsciously just wanted to go for a drive.

I've also recently had to disable the second method on one of my machines as it was waking on spurious packets after a driver update. That said, wake on patten can work if off (well in ACPI S5) but it is highly hardware dependent the driver basically has to be able to save the patterns to wake on in the card itself.

I do mention that, and explain that it has to be turned on in the BIOS and then enabled for the device... I think!

Actually, if it's Update Tuesday, or if you're powering up a machine that has not been used in a while, I've found that it's a good habit to perform TWO RESTARTS in succession, since a lot of times, after a restart with updates, sometimes only a portion of the update process occurs during the initial restart. Then, if you begin some heavy task after just one restart, and open dozens of tabs, etc., then you'll occasionally have to do another restart later that same day to bring everything up-to-date. It's easier to do them all at approximately the same time, say five or ten minutes apart. I also run tools like ccleaner at this juncture, looking for things like "Edge is Still Running" (some rogue process maybe need killin'!). - j q t -

@@denisgour1569 WoL is not OS-specific. It's hardware built in feature. It's normal PowerOn, but triggered by a magic packet, not by the human finger... Even my old mini server (like ~22 years old now) has it (except a dedicated wire is needed to handle it). Cheers!

@@denisgour1569 😁👍

I hate hibernation. The only time it was useful was XP and even then it was total junk to me.

I've actually seen fast startup off be faster off SSDs.

I haven't seen one yet that holding the power button for five or fifteen seconds won't turn it off. I don't mess with many though.

Blaming Windows for your own fault xD

What was his fault?

@@thedeegee1601OK we'll blame you if you'd locked your car and then at 3 in the morning your car decides to start itself up and burn all your fuel

I had installed windows on my laptop for about a year. And whole this year I was trying to fight with it's power ups. It does not matter if it was hibernated, or in the sleep mode, it always was turning on and checking for [censored] windows updates, mail/messengers notifications, and etc. I tried all the ways to disable this behavior I could find on the internet so far (turning off wake on lan, wake on usb device, etc.), but nothing could help me to resolve this start ups when the laptop is closed. It was so stupid that I close my laptop in the evening, and when I wake up it's completely uncharged, the battery is 0 percent. The only fix I could find is buying Mac. Now I can close my laptop and be sure if I open it next time it has the same battery level as before.

@@mekedron THose wakeups are really annoying. I stopped that by running Taskschd.msc as TrusterInstaller, disabling UpdateOrchestrator's wake task and denying write access for that task file for System. Now Windows can't reactivate that wake task after new updates are downloaded and ready for installation. :D

Thanks for the kind words!

Valve is working on that last part.

All of this exactly that I still use Vista and 7 to this day.

false - unless you using windows wrong, things are encrypted whenever written to disk, no matter what. I guess it depends on your settings and windows version, though.

Once every 2 days was the statistic found by CERN (although different papers seem to disagree a lot). A single bit out of the billions in RAM every 2 days honestly doesn't seem like much to me, unless you never close any programs ever, and those programs aren't constantly modifying the state of their memory (fixing the issues). Not to mention that ECC RAM makes these errors even less likely to have any real-world impact since they can be corrected whenever they are found.

@@miguelguthridge Indeed, and I've only powered off any of my computers in the past decade because of power outages. Although I also don't use Windows, so that might make a difference.

@@miguelguthridge Well the overwhelming majority of PC's doesn't run ECC, so that's not really that relevant for most users. Now it'd be interested in learning how DDR5 handles bit flips as it uses a form of ECC internally on the memory modules. I've worked in the PC field far longer than I care to admit, and I've always tried to steer people towards ECC memory when they spec out workstations. If your personal gaming machine crashes because of a bit flip it's unlikely to cause any long lasting problems or major costs. But in a machine used for production or economics it can be disastrous. Now if we look at the likelihood that a bit flip will cause a crash it's actually quite small. Of all the memory used by the system the absolute majority will contain graphical data, sound data and things like that. The actual code that's executable is way smaller than all the "fluff" data that memory is filled with. And not even all the executable code will actually be executed. There is a lot of code in conditional branches and error handling that will only be run very infrequently. If the bit flip occurred in code like that you might never know. And if it's in graphics or sound data chances are you wouldn't notice. Even a crash isn't what you are really afraid of. A crash will self correct the problem as it makes you aware that something is wrong. When the bit flip occurs in critical data used for calculations or in data that is the result of calculations that hasn't been written to disk yet, that's when things get scary. Unless the data has built in parity or there is some kind of sanity check on the calculations or perhaps redundant computers performing the calculations then a bit flip can go by unchallenged and the corrupted data gets logged as being good. So bit flips happens, and no, that your computer doesn't constantly crash isn't prof that it's not happening to you. And as memory size increase as does data density there are more cells and they are smaller. That means the chance that a bit flips goes up both because there are more of them, but also because the smaller the cells get the easier they are to flip. The use of ECC in the DDR5 memory modules is one sign of things getting critical, but I wish they had chosen to standardize on full ECC capability for every thing memory related. Then we would be able to see when there is a correction done and have a chance to measure the frequency with which they occur. But then I guess they don't want end users to worry about these things. Out of sight, out of mind...

Most people nowadays don't reboot for months (especially in tablets), and all is well and fine. Bit flips are not that common

@@mikemx55 I'd argue that 90% or more of the memory is used for things other than executable code, and most of it is non vital data like graphics assets, sounds and so on. You would be hard pressed to even notice a bitflip in all this data, and so you can be sure that the absolute majority of them are never discovered.

Yep. It's horribly implemented and ignores your power management settings. For example, if you close your lid but want the computer to 'do nothing', modern standby will still put your system to sleep after 15 minutes. Infuriating, but setting the BIOS/UEFI firmware sleep mode to 'Linux' restores classic, working, functionality.

I noticed this omission too, and agree that Modern Standby and Connected Standby as it was called in Windows 8 is a DISASTER. I have had the issue with the laptop overheating in the laptop bag several times, to the point that even the glue on the rubber strips on the bottom of my Dell XPS 15 melted and let loose. Fortunately, it can easily be disabled in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power CSEnabled=0

I forgot what that was called and I never figured out how it worked before now. If it's keeping the computer fully on that's probably the stupidest thing ever. I'll need to make sure I have that fully disabled on my WIn10 laptop.