Fast start is a pain in the tits, causes many a problem but I'm pretty sure it's disabled by policy here.

I had a problem where Windows had hung so I couldn't use the restart option on the start menu

Every time I pressed the power button it just did a fast start and resumed into the broken state

even holiding down the power button for 4 seconds didn't work because the system had successfully hibernated before the 4 seconds was up

the laptop battery wasn't removable so I couldn't pull the power

IIRC I ended going into the bios setup screen and leaving it there until the battery died. then I could finally get a cold start

Policy / GPO with:

Task, run at statup, as local system, powercfg.exe /h off

Kills hiberfil.sys along the way for machines with "only" 120 GB SSD. Yes, they still exist, and are actually big enough for most office usage. For Windows 7 it was not big enough, since Windows 7 did not, by default, have an automated cleanmgr.exe /AUTOCLEAN task. That came with Windows 8.

We turn it off ny default on every machine we supply. The very first windows 8 "fault" I met was wireless adapter seeing a network and not being able to connect to it, restarting fixed it, shutdown didn't. Disabling fast boot fixed it for good. Still seeing those issues today. So first and current faults still fast boot related after all these years...

What annoyed me the most (aside from the likes of Adobe et al not being aware of its problems), was that Microsoft would re-enable it on every major update to Windows 8 and through to the first couple of releases of W10. I knew that within a couple of weeks of those updates rolling out, customers would start phoning me. It's MY setting Microsoft, I turned it off for a reason, leave it alone thankyouverymuch.

Part of me still thinks it was Microsoft's embarrassment at the popularity of the "Turn if off and turn it on again" cliché that led to this policy. To this day, it's one of the first settings I check on my own system when I do a fresh install or get one of the major Windows updates.

Randomly, or because the client thought he had superpowers?

There must be a joke there, but I Kent understand it.

Superman, that joke was bad

I remember going round to a secretary for something, and she complained about problems upgrading her software.

She was on release x.y and had been told to delete it, and reinstall from diskettes(shows how long ago this was). The box said release x.z.

I sat with her, and followed the process and it all worked, but at release x.y. Till I looked at the label on the diskette and found they were for release x.y. Someone had put the old diskettes in the new box.

We found the correct diskettes, and it worked first time.

Next time - how someone took Even Longer to install software by [1]toggling the front panel switches of the computer !

[1] https://raymii.org/s/articles/Toggling_in_a_simple_program_on_the_DEC_PDP-8_and_PiDP-8_using_the_switch_register.html

Thats why I loved the IBM PS/2 range, that rocker switch on the right hand side and not a soft touch button.

wrong disks in the wrong box.

Guilty of that also. I did it ONCE.

Lesson learnt.

So he fixed the Adobe problem in a Flash...

Sorry, I had to get the Premiere Adobe pun in...

You passed Adobe Audition. Such a Cool Edit!

Took me much longer than it should to convince our PHBs this thing was impeding deployments and causing high OS uptimes. They then claimed it was too much effort to switch off. Cobblers, it's a simple one-liner.

What else do you expect from a PHB ?

We also had this issue.

User : "My Internet is not working!"

Me : "Reboot!"

User : "I did it!"

Me : after going to the user and checking, yup, ickdoze fast start is doing funky stuff...

Apply Registry patch.

We hateses it, we hateses it, we hateses it forever!!!

Secondary way to solve this: "Unplug power cable while the PC is running, and then plug it back in". Users are afraid? "Sometimes Windows needs that to remember who is in power."

Quickest Fix : I drove from London to Cornwall to press the turbo button (yes it was a long time ago) on the front of a PC. "Oh, that turbo button !" said the end customer 30 seconds after I arrived. "I was pressing this one." .. Deeply unimpressed when I pointed out that that button said reset on it... ....... The inability to read or listen is the main issue with support over the phone.

I did have a nice pasty before going home.

2nd quickest fix... plugging in the monitor to the mains... but fortunately that was in London.

Quickest fix: Turning on the printer that was definitely, without question, are you calling me an idiot you pleb, turned on

Slowest fix: Travelling from London to Aberdeen to turn on the printer.

I travelled to another site once for a unnecessary fix . It wasn't too far but it interrupted my game of Unreal Tournament :D

Armed with a description of fault from helpdesk: "User cannot get email" , I arrived at site and made my way to the one person sized office on the first floor. I poked my head in the door , saw a black screen with a familiar looking bit of text at the top left and said to the guy: "Press eject on the floppy drive , then turn it off and on again"

Working nights doing tech support in a Uni. Got a call during a period of heavy snow (so the roads around campus were very icy) from a lecturer panicking because he was about to start a lecture and there was no power to the AV system in the room. We had laptop and projector packs we could lend out for emergencies such as this, so I picked one up and struggled to the building next door (where the lecture was). The laptop and projector weren't massively expensive, but were not cheap either, so I was a little concerned I'd drop the pack on the icy road.

Got to the lecture theatre, and looked at the AV system. The lecturer was right. No lights on any of it, so no power. Then I looked at the mains switch on the wall. Someone had helpfully turned it off.

I flicked the swtich, everything sprung to life, and after about 5 minutes of fans wirring up and slowing down (the AV equipment in use did not boot quickly, hence the reason it was usually left powered up, just in standby mode) and the control LCD panel displaying various logos, the AV system was up and running, and the lecturer happy.

I wasn't however, I had to go out into sub zero temperatures and struggle back to the building containing my office, with the portable projector and laptop, which was heavy enough that, TBH, the description "Portable" was debatable. This was the early 2000s. The projectors we had were from the late 90s, and were not small, or light. They were also expensive.

Arriving on site to a lady with absolutely no power.

Reached down and switched on the consumer isolator that had been switched off when she put a broom back.

I saw "Fast startup" for the bullshit that it is/was when it first appeared. I could not believe that Microsoft has the idea of "Hey lets pretend we shut down when actually we didnt and call it 'fast startup' "

Its ludicrous!

They basically just rewired "shutdown" to go to the same method as "hibernate"

I mean - everybody knows that "Turn it off and on again" is THE key tool / cure / diagnostic in I.T. work . Why would you take that away ? Its deliberate goddam sabotage for gods sake .

Its like taking a roadworkers shovel away , or an electricians voltmeter , in fact its WORSE than that - its like secretly replacing the electrician's voltmeter with a joke one that shows 240v all the time, which you only find aout about when you measure a 12v dc psu.

Remembering this microsoft bullshit has really pissed me off for the day . If peopel wanted their machine to hiberanate they would have pressed hiberante.

ITs goddamn cheating!!

/rant

> They basically just rewired "shutdown" to go to the same method as "hibernate"

Not completely! You programs are closed, you are logged off, all task are reduced to a minimum, and then hibernate. The difference is that full hibernate leaves everything you have opened in the state of "right now", including heavy number crunching tasks in the background. And if you wake it up again it continues right where it left off, without causing data corruption on mentioned crunching tasks. At least on MY machines :D.

Fast start is not as bad as it once was, but still causes havoc from time to time. Though I've come to like using hibernate deliberately.

(you can skip from here of you want to hear things that work well on Win10/11 - and I am not talking about the UI)

Usage here: I am out of the house and got some leftover solar power? PC-on, do some stuff until solar power is out, then hibernate again. To my surprise: ffmpeg.exe decode | SvtAv1EncApp.exe (or rav1e-ch.exe) can take to be interrupted in the middle, 100% CPU load, by hibernate, and continues once power is back without data corruption. Even if > 20 of those tasks run in parallel. Each of them encoding a part of the source video, the best way to fully use an AMD 5950x. Since the internal multithread capabilities of those encoders just tile up the video and therefore hurt compression, quality and still cannot fully utilize that CPU therefore are still slower, cut it is.

Never knew that this "Fast Start" feature was so dumb - surely it could have been written with a flag for "one of your files has been updated - do a cold start"?

It actually does. But if a file gets changed while the PC is in hibernate, it is indeed right to assume something is wrong and a full clean start is done. Example: Put the drive in a different PC, even without knowingly writing something on it, just mounting RW instead of RO.

[edit] Oh, Now I get what you mean. That was an Adobe bug, for not using the "PendingFileRenameOperations" key. Until they were forced to do so sometime 2011 due to FastStart, ignoring that key for over a decade.

Tool to utilize: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pendmoves

Thanks, that makes sense.

We have a Windows 10 box, running some VMs, where we run update once a month, which we did on Monday night.

By mid morning on Tuesday we were getting numerus reports from people dependent on the various VMs that they were being kicked off but could get stright back in

We looked in and things OK. Looking at the logs, Windows 10 was going to Sleep every 20 mins. So running the latest Windows update re-enabled Sleep function.

Why can't they just leave setting set?

"Why can't they just leave setting set?"

Because they know better than you. Applies to a lot of things. Search. Recall. Clippy. Etc. Etc.

Client had network issue on a PC. "Push the cable back in".

Nope, wouldn't do it. I had a train to catch to get to a medical appointment in London.

Set off, diverted to site, parked up. Walked in, pushed cable back in. Walked out, continued to drive to the station.

Billed call out for being bloody stupid.

Regardless of everything else:

Why does a software update of a PDF viewer REQUIRE A FULL SYSTEM RESTART IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM?!

It's this ridiculousness that we have to kill off - even if that's because of poor MS OS handling of DLLs etc. - not Fast Startup.