Enable/disable Fast Start in Windows 10

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What's Fast Start?

Fast Start is a new Windows functionality Microsoft implemented starting with Windows 8.1 that realizes a faster startup.

If you activate this feature, Windows won't be completely shut down when you click the power down button.


Fast Start implements a hybrid shutdown, which will save the kernel session and device drivers to the hibernation file on disk (hiberfil.sys). When booting your PC, Windows reads the saved system information and resumes your system from the hibernation state instead of fully restarting it. This technique allows for much faster boot times (30-70% faster on most systems tested, according to experts). If your motherboard supports UEFI, this functionality implements a yet faster startup.

Scenarios

You may want to tweak this functionality in two different scenarios:

1. Dual boot
2. Slow boot-up time.

In case of dual boot, you may want to disable Fast Start.

In fact, as Windows gets never fully shut down, it doesn't recognize changes made to a partition located on the same drive.

In fact, when you write files to a partition recognized by Windows and then boot into the operating system, the files just created are nowhere to be found.

In case of a slow boot time, enabling Fast Startup helps solve this problem.

Tweaking Fast Startup settings

•  Access Settings/Power and Sleep and click Choose what power buttons do.
•  Click Change Settings that are currently unavailable (refer to the above figure). More hidden settings will be displayed.
• Scroll down to find Shutdown settings.
• In Shutdown settings, select/deselect Turn on fast startup