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

[@Fiyaaaahh]

There's the possibility to disable fast boot In the "Choose what the power buttons do" menu of the Power Options. That way a shutdown becomes an actual full shutdown.

[@g00gleminus96]

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.

[@paulstubbs7678]

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

[@northwiebesick7136]

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

[@LA-MJ]

Powercfg /h off

[@arthurmoore9488]

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.

[@MusashiOf5Rings]

I once had a customer come in with a computer that was really messed up. Big black sections of the screen, open apps not displaying properly, and very poor response from input. She had probably 20 apps open, as well. I was able to check with a backend tool, she hadn't restarted in over a year. She agreed to let me restart it. It functioned quite normally after that, and fortunately, she hadn't lost much work. She agreed to restart her computer periodically after that.

[@bite-sizedshorts9635]

I only shut the power going to my computer once every few months. It works fine running 24/7 for months at a time. Eventually, I'll have too many browser windows open at the same time while doing research and gag the memory. Nothing I do is super high powered so I only put 8GB of memory in it when I built it 12 or 13 years ago. I'm saving a ton of money by not getting new computers every two or three years like I did back in the 90s when things were advancing quickly. Now all I do is add more storage for the files I want to always have online for my research and play.

[@DavidLeutzinger]

Memory leak, it ate all available ram memory and went insane.

[@VDNKh_]

As a desktop support tech I hated Fast Startup. I'd have to explain to everyone why restart and shutdown were now different, and if I told someone to reboot I now have to specify restart and not shutdown.

[@danman32]

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

[@ElizabethGreene]

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.

[@thommas09]

I went out of my way to straight up disable it on every device in our environment.

[@Nautilus1972]

Just be glad you never supported Windows 95.

[@cakeisamadeupdrug6134]

I do love that Fast Startup came in just in time for just about everyone to be booting from an SSD.

[@RFC3514]

On my system, AFAICT, W10 doesn't even bother to use Fast Startup. A full Windows boot (excluding POST) takes just under 7 seconds. And, with 64 GB of RAM, "Fast Startup" / shutdown would probably end up taking longer.

[@marko1395]

@@RFC3514 Did you check? Because it was enabled by default for me.

[@totojejedinecnynick]

Dave I have a suggestion: A complete, step by step cold boot of a modern day PC - from PSU power on to login screen. Mobo, intelME, memory check, TPM verification, BIOS, bootloaders, kernel... To really show us what really goes on while we wait for PC startup. I saw an article about Linux booting and it was fascinating to learn how top-level user accessible OS actually is and what is REALLY happening underneath it - and before it can happen.

[@neodonkey]

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!

[@kingjames4886]

didn't they teach you that in school?

[@treborrrrr]

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

[@kingjames4886]

@@treborrrrr it's not reeeally all that different

[@meatbag8751]

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.

[@M0rn1n6St4r]

In Windows, _Shift + Shutdown_ (or _Shift + Ok_ in the _Alt + F4_ dialogue, with “Shutdown” selected in the select-box) overrides Fast-boot. The OS will shutdown with Fast-boot _temporarily_ disabled. _Shift + Restart_ restarts into a boot-options (recovery) menu.

[@davybloggs1564]

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

[@M0rn1n6St4r]

@@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.

[@M0rn1n6St4r]

@@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.

[@ChristopherWoods]

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.

[@M0rn1n6St4r]

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

[@michaelpezzulo4413]

Love your channel. I was a pc consultant from 83 to 2004 then retired. Trying to get back into the field now with studying for my A+. the background you provide is priceless. Thank you.

[@braddixon3338]

I always find your videos informative about subtle things "under the hood" with Windows that I never knew before. Oh, you're of course entertaining as well and have an excellent delivery on the info. Great channel.

[@DavesGarage]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@RofStyx4]

In the control panel under System and security->Power Options->Change what the power buttons do; there is a checkbox for turn on fast startup that is checked by default. Unchecking it makes shutdown a proper shutdown again.

[@davybloggs1564]

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

[@RofStyx4]

@@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.

[@DavidBoura]

@@RofStyx4 Thanks

[@redmatrix]

Can't seem to find it on my Win10.

[@lyrimetacurl0]

I checked and looks like I already did this in 2021 so nice to get reminded anyway.

[@Cklodar]

Came into this video thinking I already knew all the things end users should know about shutdown/restart/sleep/hibernation... But this video still taught me the new knowledge that hibernations, which I use daily on my laptop, still consume a tiny bit of power to facilitate WOLs. Since I have no utility for WOL, it's now disabled on all my network adapters. Thanks Dave!

[@kote315]

I usually turn off fast startup for two reasons: 1. This does not work correctly on some of my (slightly outdated) hardware. 2. As far as I understand, this does not record information that the NTFS partition was correctly unmounted. Which causes problems in other OSes. They assume that the filesystem has not been correctly unmounted, it may contain some errors, and, as a precaution, do not allow write-mounts.

[@eDoc2020]

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.

[@kevindondrea144]

I KNEW IT!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you!!! I thought there was something odd about Rebooting. When we do it to help an end user, some programs are sometimes still running like Excel or Word. Being good at troubleshooting and BS I tell people I think it may only be going to hibernate before starting again. I just now shared this video with my coworkers to confirm what I have been telling them the past year.

[@NetBandit70]

No mention of modern standby (in newer laptops) which breaks all the normal power management settings. What a pain it was trying to figure out why my system would go to sleep even if I had power management set to never sleep.

[@bite-sizedshorts9635]

I don't ever turn off my computer but once in a few months if the memory gets gagged by too many open browser windows. I cut the power to it and then turn the power back on. The computer runs fine for a few more months. I built it myself 12 or 13 years ago, and it does everything I want it to do, whether recording and cleaning up old records, editing videos, downloading thousands of file, editing my various web pages, writing books, or whatever. It just works. And if it ever quits, I can fix it. I'm 70 and can do almost anything I set my mind to.

[@andydraw4707]

Another great video. Thank you Dave. I got to 162 days on my MacBook several years ago. I bragged on some forum where a Windows guy (a friend) was complaining about having to reboot every week on average. Later that day, karma hit me. Xcode suddenly refused to compile my project. I tried all sorts. Reverted changes. Shut down Xcode etc etc. The errors made no sense whatsoever. Until I found a post online about Xcode having a memory leak. The humanity of it! I had to reboot. Almost on topic - I once took a call from an elderly member of the public who started with "I believe I have information which will lead to the arrest of theee international hacker" (if you're trying to imagine the accent, think of Tucker out of something about Mary). Temptation was to hangup on the premise it must be a colleague winding me up. After a short chat, it became obvious his computer was "waking up" every time his phone line rang, which his modem was connected to.

[@MrIlovesubaru]

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

[@anon_y_mousse]

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

[@cigmorfil4101]

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

[@anon_y_mousse]

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

[@eDoc2020]

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.

[@Lord-Sméagol]

It didn't take me long to notice that Windows 10 Shutdown was actually hibernating: 1: I had 64 GB RAM. 2: I used DriveSnapshot to backup my system, and it would not backup a hibernated system. Disabling Fast Startup in Power Options is easy enough, but I decided that I didn't want to keep blasting my SSDs with massive writes, so I simply disabled hibernation, and would just use Sleep. If I had a power loss, I wouldn't lose much, as I would make sure any current work was saved before Sleeping. If the power loss corrupted my system, I could just restore my system image if Windows was unable to repair the damage. Why Microsoft didn't simply add a Fast Shutdown option and keep Shutdown to mean what EVERYONE had got used to was just madness!

[@owlmostdead9492]

Fast Start in Windows is something I always disable, in today's age where SSD's are pretty much the standard, the bluescreens it often causes is more a bug than a feature.

[@Melds]

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

[@alexatkin]

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.

[@billschannel1116]

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

[@mibbio2148]

@@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.

[@davidharrison6535]

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.

[@phillupson8561]

I always use GP to disable fast boot across client networks, especially helpful when you ask a user to restart and they shutdown and turn on again.

I always turn off fast startup, mostly because the difference of 1-2 seconds extra doesn't matter, and I turn off my computer when I go to bed. This means that updates don't happen at inconvenient times (as windows gets an opportunity once every day), and it's freshly booted every morning.

[@rpocc]

I use WOL on all my 4 tower machines. Three of them are running Windows 7 and I shut them down and able to power them on by WOL packets sent by scripts on Mikrotik smart switch or directly connected Mikrotik router. My latest MB doesn’t allow setting WOL from Setup, however I’ve managed to enable it via driver settings in Windows 10’s ncpa control panel.

[@johnpalmer5131]

Thanks, Dave. As a true geek who hales all the way back to the preDOS days, I truly enjoy your videos… I invariably learn something from each one and love the ‘inside baseball’ commentary.

[@SuperAWaC]

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

[@stephenstone5700]

A huge thank you, Dave. I have been having problems with my monitor thinking it, my cable, or my card were going bad; the bottom third of my screen display would flake out and get garbled. It would self correct and start the cycle again. I switched cables, reinstalled my graphics card and video drivers, and nothing worked. I also tried "cold" booting my system several times and it didn't help either. But, when I did the restart boot you mentioned, Voila, it has worked perfectly ever since.

[@_nikeee]

Helpful: When using `shutdown -s`, Windows won't do a hybrid shutdown. I'd also recommend using "restart", just to be sure. You can also use the Task Manager to see if you've done a "proper" shutdown by looking at the uptime in the performance tab. Often, you can observe time spans spanning a couple of days despite using "Start -> Shutdown". There is also Shift + Shutdown to force a "proper" shutdown.

[@joesterling4299]

Good to know. Thanks.

[@Plasmacore_V]

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

[@vicr123]

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

[@TheVicar]

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

[@Mirddes]

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

[@gammaboost]

You should've mentioned the (annoying) Modern Sleep that windows has on newer laptops. It's annoying because I don't want my surface to overheat in the bag and I can't enable regular sleep in any way. I just hibernate it way too often instead. For a long time I had fast startup switched off because I was told it was better, but when I turned it back on the boot speed went from 22 secs to 15 secs, which is worth it for me.

[@DavidHansen725]

Thanks for this video! I'm going to direct my clients to this video when they ask why after I tell them to restart instead of shut down when their computer is acting wonky. Using the uptime counter in the task manager is another great way to help people vizualise the difference.

[@jb888888888]

Many years ago (2003-2006) I had a job at a huge law firm. The computers ran XP. The rule from the IT department was at the end of your work day, reboot your computer; not logoff, not shutdown, but reboot. When you came in the next day you log in as normal. I found it odd but as a tiny cog in a giant machine I did what I was told. A couple of times we came in to discover signs posted by IT saying to reboot your computer again before use -- there was a major important update to install _right now_ which rebooting would take care of.

[@pasixty6510]

I learned from my experienced computer tutors in the eighties, the term ‚bootstrap‘ was related to a short piece of punched paper tape, about the length of a bootstrap, that was inserted into the reader to start up a computer and enable it to start the programs fed in from the upcoming spools of punched tape / cards or similar storage devices. So ‚boot‘ the machine was likely an abbreviated way of saying ‚let the run through the machine‘.

[@allanrichardson9081]

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.

[@UteChewb]

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.

[@Ylyrra]

"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.)

[@liamodell7191]

Back in the 90's, me and my tech friends would refer to sleep mode as "coma mode" because upon awake, sometimes it ran slower or had trouble loading things into RAM. ... or maybe I just had crap hardware at the time.

[@GlenHHodges]

Dave has reached 250k subscribers. Woot-woot! 🎉

[@amcadam26]

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

[@valtros2k10]

@@amcadam26 Done.

[@billandmyraclarke2809]

Great episode! I'm telling all my programmer friends about your channel. 3 things: 1.) So, for those us who got it but need reinforcement, like, need to write it down: Restart - clears everything and brings up a fully reset state. AND Hibernate (set for "When lid is closed") is more desireable than power off because it does power off but on wake quickly returns to where I left off with minamal power consumption. Right? 2.) To optimize the longevity of my laptop battery, I guess leave it plugged in and have "close the lid" hibernate the laptop? 3.) Do you happen to know or giess why MS doesnt have a battery meter that reminds the user to plug-in the charger when it drops below, say, 20%. And another notification or bell to tell the user the batts has reached 100% charge (or should it be 85%?) and to unplugg the charger? I like watching your channel. It brings back lots of good memories: The PDP-11/70 days were lots of fun, UNIX and C had there moments too.

[@sumikomei]

This is pretty interesting. I'd long since disabled fast boot in bios way back in the beginning because I was running into some problems and inconsistencies with it. I never really knew explicitly what it did until now (and honestly it makes me more glad I disabled it lol).

[@garrymca8336]

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.

[@xBINARYGODx]

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

[@chromerims]

Disable 'fast startup' in settings. Might have to ungrey it by selecting "Choose what power buttons do" and "Change settings that are currently unavailable." Presto. Shutdown is shutdown. If paranoid, additionally disable 'hibernation.' In most BIOS, you can prohibit fast startups. Great video 👍 Kindest regards, neighbours and friends.

[@davida1hiwaaynet]

Very interesting Dave! Thank you. I've been into automotive and industrial engine tuning; and industrial control (PLC) programming for a while. I always have my laptop set so that it "does nothing" when the screen is closed; so that I can close the screen to conceal it, protect it in industrial environments, and save battery due to backlight. That will allow the connection to the ECM or PLC to stay active. Then when I open the screen, it's all still up and connected. Then the "hibernate" function is a real God-send. Disconnect the device getting programmed, one-touch of the power button, and the laptop hibernates. After I make wiring changes, etc. then I can power back on and reconnect without any drama. Thanks again for sharing details of your time at Microsoft. It's fascinating to hear about the underpinnings of the features we use daily.

[@eDoc2020]

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?

[@davida1hiwaaynet]

@@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.

[@eDoc2020]

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

[@jagmarc]

Reminds me something about the 1982 Sinclair Spectrum design: its CPU didn't utilize the Z80's NMI vector so asserting the NMI pin on CPU just caused a hard reset. So the trick was to wire a press button to the NMI and patch the ROM with code to do something really neat like run an executive user routine with options to save or load a snapshot 'hibernate' image to/from FDD or print the screen etc.

[@drstefankrank]

Because of monthly patchdays, you reboot at least once per month if you don't skip on updates.

[@CrushMixes]

I disable Hibernation, and all forms of sleep and thus a power off and restart do the same thing as there is nothing stored and doing this also saves space and saves SSD's

[@paulrobertmarino7623]

interesting explanation thanks Dave. On a related note for years now I've recommended people configure their laptops to hibernate rather than sleep not just as a power saving method but also for stability reasons. its not uncommon for laptops to have issues waking up from sleep especially if its a new model this is doubly true for Linux users where there may be a driver fix for the issue on windows but not on Linux. Aside from the first few years when the feature was supported I have never seen a machine ever have an issue waking up from hibernation. Also if you are one of those now rare dual booters who haven't switched to WSL it can also be helpful if you want to quickly switch back and forth between operating systems. just remember on the Linux side the swap partition is used to save the state so you must have a swap file big enough for the content of both your system and GPU ram and you should probably reduce your "vm_swappiness" possibly to 0 so you don't burn out your SSD.

[@adamgeorge8327]

If you have windows 8 - 11 Pro you can turn off hybrid sleep in Group Policy. When I worked in IT we did this for everything because we ended up getting a lot less errors on users machines that we never properly rebooted. It makes a shutdown a shutdown again. I enable it on all my computers because I don't mind about the few extra seconds on boot to make sure that it is a fresh load of the OS

[@volvo09]

Always a fan of your videos... The bit of history always brings me back to some period of tinkering around... This time adding hibernate to my win98 desktop PC back in the day and feeling cool. 😎

[@mrdownboy]

I think you mean Win2k. I might be wrong.

[@montebont]

Thanks Dave! Best explanation I've ever heard. Maybe this is helpful as well for troubleshooting. I feel ashamed to admit it because I've worked in ICT as a (systems level) programmer since 1974 and should have known better. All of a sudden my W10 PC stopped working. I know: first thing to check is the power supply. The plug was securely in the wall outlet and my PC booted slowly (so there had been a power loss) but worked OK. 10 minutes later: same problem. Another boot: worked fine. Until my mouse and keyboard stopped working and the power LED on my USB hub didn't light up. Only then I realized that a power cable has 2 ends: one on the mains outlet and the one on back of the PC. The PC end had - for some reason - become loose. Pushed it all the way in, secured it with 2 toothpicks and since then it works fine.

[@wngimageanddesign9546]

I've been straightened out like a pretzel. Thanks Microsoft! You should have included some tips on disabling prefetch and superfetch, and these pseudo shutdown options in the registry. I've disabled prefetch for my Windows systems since they run on SSDs and having copies of files for a quick boot is a waste of space. Great channel, thanks Dave!

[@prycenewberg3976]

That one watt of power matters a lot more when I place the laptop into a backpack immediately upon shutdown. I can't tell you the number of times I've opened my backpack to pull the thing out only to find a sauna inside the backpack and the fans running full blast. It's due to this reason that I use Hibernate so much.

[@PRH123]

Amazes me that after 40 some years of making laptops the industry still hasn't sorted that one out. Same thing's happened to me even with non-HD notebooks.

[@MrMcp76]

Great video! Really enjoyed the history of booting a system, really helps to visualize what is going on. I work in IT and ever since Fast Boot became a thing we have been disabling it for our end-users because when we ask them to do a restart they end up powering off thinking that it was even more helpful. Microsoft must have caught on to the issue Fast Boot was causing, as now when a your system needs a reboot due to a Windows update, the power-off option adds a new "update and power off" selection.

[@anon_y_mousse]

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

[@babybirdhome]

@@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).

[@anon_y_mousse]

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

[@pogo55555]

Dave. What can I say? I hate watching KZbin videos that are more than 5 minutes long. Your videos are an exception. I listen to them more than once. A veritable wellspring of sagacity and practical knowledge. Well done. I gotta get back to my second listening. I like to vary the playback speeds as well. Both faster and slower than the default.

[@ivekuukkeli2156]

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

[@onffxiimanon]

Thanks Dave, your videos always teach me something while being emotionally calming. All the best, keep the content coming. :)

[@jttcosmos]

Turning off fast start-up is the first thing I do after setting up a new Windows machine. I'm more than happy to wait a few extra seconds every morning in order to ensure that patches etc. are all installed properly.

[@rfvtgbzhn]

7:20 I think the main reason for this is that people want to close the lid and then immediatly but the laptop in a bag and walk away. All this movement would be quite bad for a running hard disk.

[@Aaron-wg6ft]

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.

[@maalekar]

Nice. I consider myself one of the ancients as well sir. Started one of the earliest ISPs here in MN, owned one of the earliest clones available. Did all the memory mgmt of card installations in the old dos days. Saw the first browser come in with CERN, a DoD site, and one other (I think a college site) and that was it. I think people don't get the value of understanding how things work at a low level in relation to today's commonly accepted complexity. I learned a bit on this one and appreciate the vid :) I wish you the best.

[@hquest]

Even while I knew most of this, I still learned quite a good bit! Thanks Dave for the knowledge. May I ask your take on the CPU Management Engine features - which sort of steps into some of the key points discussed on this video,?

[@KarstenJohansson]

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.

[@ivoivanov7407]

Disabling "Fast Boot" also will cut off power from USB ports, unless the motherboard have a feature to power some of USB ports (many of today MBs do offer that feature) in order to charge phone/tablet while PC is off. If the "Fast Boot" is enabled (default) the USB ports are powered even if PC is off.

[@jdmayfield88]

Back in the day, I had spliced together a dual-boot Windows 98 and Loop-Linux machine. The two sides could comfortably work on the FAT32 partition. I had to compile the source for the Linux network driver or the Linksys card I had in this unit. It worked great-- except when it didn't. At first, it seemed very random. Sometimes when I booted into Linux, the network card just wouldn't work. After a day or so, I realized-- when I cold-booted to the Linux side, network card always worked. But when I rebooted to Linux, after running Windows, network card wouldn't work. Back then machines turned all the way off, or you had to turn them off physically with a switch or button after "shutting down". Then I realized what was happening: the NIC wasn't completely refreshing after being initialized by Windows. It was remembering whatever Windows had told it between reboots-- i.e. It's internal memory wasn't being cleared. This prevented Linux from communicating with it properly. Oddly, the reverse was not true-- I could reboot from Linux to Windows and it would work fine. So, either Linux was being nice and clearing the NIC's memory when going down on a warm boot, or Windows was being a jerk and not clearing the NIC's memory on warm boot, or the opposite: Windows may have been smart enough to clear the NIC's memory when starting up on warm boot, and Linux was not. Hard to say. Anyway-- it is true, memory may not be cleared between shutdown and startup on a warm boot. Today, thankfully, things are generally simpler. However, there is that: As long as power is supplied to RAM of any sort, it only clears it's contents if those contents are explicitly over-ridden. The only other way to clear content's of RAM is to completely remove power.

[@rayoflight62]

It took 10 years for laptop bios to properly restore the computer after a suspension (not hibernation). The computer powered up, but the ethernet and WiFi wasn't connecting, external USB disks were lost, Bluetooth was disconnected (A2DP devices especially), screen brightness was messed up, and more. Perhaps you can shed a light on why it took so long for laptop manufacturers to mend an apparently straightforward operation. Thank you for the trip down the memory lane... P.S.: the best moments of my long IT experience are those of the launch of Windows XP (after being obliterated by the Trumpet Winsocks). My worst IT moments were at the time of the 486/66 and Local Bus computers. Thank you once more. Regards... Anthony - from the UK.

[@eDoc2020]

Most of the issues you are describing will mostly be OS (and to a lesser extend device-based) as AFAIK the main BIOS is only responsible for keeping RAM intact and re-entering the OS. Actually ACPI code (which is stored in the BIOS) is likely responsible for much of your problems as it can potentially tell hardware to cut power to certain components. In any case I don't remember having many problems like you describe so maybe you were just unlucky with your machine models. And of course some things like Bluetooth devices being disconnected are going to be because it's physically impossible for a device to stay connected to an unpowered host. For USB disks being lost, it could also be drives which aren't able to reconnect in a reasonable amount of time. I've encountered that with some devices but usually flash drives work just fine.

[@JortBont]

This reminds me of the days of Win95 and NT4. There was no sound driver for NT4 and the Win95 drivers didn't work. But, when you first booted up Win95, did a soft reboot and then started NT4 you did have sound like normal.

[@Brunnen_Gee]

10:36 I've always done that as well, usually months between reboots. Some people think it's crazy, but I've never seen anything to make me believe more frequent reboots are necessary. I typically only reboot if a piece of software requires it for an update or installation, or if I'm doing some system tweaking and testing (or in the rare event that things aren't working right). But outside of those, my PC stays on. I've always done it this way and unless something changes, will continue to do so.

[@denvera1g1]

I've found that hybernation(only) has been far more reliable, i've noticed that sleep, and hybrid sleep often result in network and USB not always working properly after wake, its rare, but when you manage over 1000 different machines, you tend to notice a higher ticket volume for wifi and keyboards not working when you enabled sleep because you wanted to save power/heat across all campuses.

[@adamgeorge8327]

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%

[@denvera1g1]

@@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

[@robsku1]

@@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.

[@karlrovey]

@@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.

[@denvera1g1]

@@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.

[@Ktulu789]

I still have machines with Win7 that support WOL because WOL is a feature of the LAN card and lately the BIOS and not of the OS. A LAN card must have 5VDC always for it to work. And the IP is not needed in reality since the magic packet is broadcasted to the entire network, not just one or any IP. You can anyways use the IP to ping the OS when it's up and running :) Great content and channel, Dave!

[@Hobbitstomper]

The question is why? Why did Microsoft think this was a good idea. All of my non-technical friends and family members always ask me for help with silly issues, most of which could have been fixed with a "real reboot". So why Microsoft? Why? Is it all just to "fake" the booting/wake time of the operating system?

[@katbryce]

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

[@_nikeee]

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.

[@katbryce]

@@_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.

[@_nikeee]

@@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.

[@BrianG61UK]

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

[@trog69]

You were talking to me about the reboot/restart thing. I was, until seeing this video, of the mind that shutting down entirely was the way to REALLY start from scratch. But, since Win8 I've just always restarted when anything strange occurs, particularly when something causes the game I'm in to glitch. It seems that if I don't restart, eventually whatever caused the game to glitch will rear its head elsewhere soon enough, and restarting seems to fix it 99% of the time. But, I still held the old views about rebooting being a better way to clear things up, so thanks for putting that idea to rest.

[@maxusboostus]

A few years ago, I hibernated my windows 10 laptop and popped it into my rucksack to take home. On arriving home I could smell a very hot electrical smell. During my bike ride home windows had decided to power back up and attempt some update and due to the vents being blocked became dangerously hot. The end result was the battery pack being ruined and I no longer using Windows 10 on my laptop again.

[@TheDeeGeeNL]

Blaming Windows for your own fault xD

[@axonis2306]

What was his fault?

[@jagmarc]

@@TheDeeGeeNLOK 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

[@mekedron]

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.

[@TishSerg]

@@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

[@abudhabikid]

when in doubt you can always flip the button on your power supply (desktop assumed) easily some of the best content around. thanks for the education and laughs!

[@carstenfrandsen]

This is actually why I always (on my own laptops) always turn-off this. Do a shutdown/power-off/restart cycle every 1-2 weeks. Too many apps still have memory leaks or leave external hw in an undetermined state. My work computers always get shutdown at EOB and started from fresh SOB.

[@ChrisM541]

THIS x1024

[@RowiDankelsaft]

I had to turn off wake on lan because I couldnt send my computer to sleep: Every single time the computer would wake back up by itself shortly after. Sometimes literally 20 seconds after having gone to "sleep". Everyone had told me that it was my fault, that the mouse moved or whatever, but even unplugging any entry devices would bring the same situation. It only got solved upon disabling WoL and I havent had any issues since.

[@unvergebeneid]

On Linux you can just set the WoL flag on your NIC at any time; I usually do it in a startup script. Interesting to hear how Windows handles this automatically depending on the sleep mode. Not sure if mentioning Linux on this channel is heresy though... 🤔

[@airjuri]

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

[@SubTroppo]

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.

[@IMBlakeley]

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'

[@joefish6091]

@@airjuri 'Tell Max , Amiga rules'

[@EwanMarshall]

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

[@printnub7585]

Hey Dave, Just wanted to say YOU ROCK!

[@RosiePerera]

Thanks, Dave. Very interesting. I've always wondered about this stuff.

[@moetocafe]

Very well made video. To be honest, I didn't learn anything new, but for users it is explained perfectly well and in understandable language. The most interesting part for me was your bio. I'm kind of an old dude and I've been using probably all or almost all of the OS you have worked on in the past -starting with MS-DOS. Interesting channel, so I've just subscribed.

[@SSJ0016]

Ironically by the time they started making these changes, SSDs were almost already ubiquitous, making the changes not only meaningless, but decreased the user's understanding of their system at the same time. Good job MS.

[@Ughmahedhurtz]

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.

[@aaronjenkins9573]

@@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.

[@Ughmahedhurtz]

@@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.

[@ChannelSho]

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.

[@monad_tcp]

@@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.

[@VoXeR91]

Fast boot is something I've turned off instatly in BIOS on all new machines since its first introduction, but cool to konw more "behind the scenes" things as usual in these videos!

[@peterlekkerkerker4482]

I was told bootstrapping came from Baron von Munchausen, a fantasy figure from an old story. Like you explained, he gets himself out of trouble by pulling on is bootstraps. Wikipedia has an article about this.

[@TheGreatAtario]

An old story, and an amazing movie

[@traewatkins931]

I thought it was a cowboy reference.

[@WatchesTrainsAndRockets]

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

[@skellious]

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

[@LeifNelandDk]

@@WatchesTrainsAndRockets if Wikipedia is wrong on something, change it, with proper sources, don't just bitch about the errors.

[@TheBlaser55]

Great videos! You may be too young to remember but bootstrap came from the rows of diodes that would represent bits of a code word for starting up a computer like a PDP-11. Bits would be ones or zeros based on diodes being removed. The rows of diodes looked like bootstraps..... we would start a computer by loading one word at a time vua switches on front of the computer. Then there was the core memory where each bit was a tiny bead with 3 hair thin wires going through each one...... early 80s......

[@Shiny_Hunter_Rob]

For years, every time I need to shut down a PC, I'll use the "shutdown -s -t 0" command. I was told that it bypasses Hybrid Sleep and stuff like that.

[@tekvax01]

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

[@WilliamHaisch]

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

[@BDBD16]

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

[@darrennew8211]

There's also usually a poorly-named option in the BIOS somewhere under the Advanced Power Management to say "when you're off, turn all the way off." Otherwise, the RGB lights keep going and dumb crap like that. The EU required motherboards to be able to actually turn all the way off.

[@tekvax01]

The only REAL COLD boot is removing the power cord from the computer power supply. I've had networking issues surviving multiple cold reboots and restart cycles because the NIC card remains powered on via the standby 5 volt supply, that only goes down if the plug is pulled! I have lost count of how many times this has bitten me on-site! The NIC card holds the ARP lookup table, and DHCP gets confused and will NOT serve an IP reservation until you pull the plug!

[@joesterling4299]

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.

[@nrocirpactar5697]

@@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.

[@NiyaKouya]

Great explanation ^^ Pretty much the first thing I do on a fresh windows installation is disabling fast boot and enabling suspend to disk. Mostly because I want to decide myself if I want to hibernate or shut down fully. In the end I usually pick S2D and only reboot/shutdown when driver installations or updates require it.

[@markmccomish7864]

Thanks Dave! Superb update for those of us who “used to know” the details of the boot cycle. 😉

[@AmericaAndAllies]

For AC only powered PCs there is zero need for sleep/hibernate. Over the years, the very first thing that I do is disable these features after a fresh install. The implementation has been buggy since the inception so far as hardware drivers are concerned. It was source of many blue screens.

[@stephenalexander321]

Dave is the best technical teacher I've ever encountered. He knows his material perfectly, doesn't make the mistakes that many instructors make, and has an engaging and personable style. He's instantly likeable. Thank you, Dave, for doing this channel!

[@DavesGarage]

Thanks for the kind words!

[@mandisaplaylist]

7:20 Plus most people tend to start moving the laptop around after closing the lid (put it into a bag for example) and doing that with the disk active is extremely prone to damaging the disk. Hence no hybrid sleep is preferred for those computers.

[@VernesMisadventures]

Hey Dave, Great video as always. I was surprised you didn't cover the practice of holding the left shift key while click shutdown in Windows 10. I've found that to be quite useful for getting a fresh boot to run utilities or a live disk from a flash drive. Any thoughts or corrections?

[@DavesGarage]

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

[@amergigolo1442]

Always wondered why it takes my computer longer to reboot than if I power it down and turn it back on. Very informative this podcast.

[@springford9511]

Another great video, thanks. That shutdown/power-on no longer does a full system refresh by default is one of MS's worst decisions. Naive users dream that they are doing a system refresh and they are not. I ALWAYS disable Fast-Startup on my own system or others because I want to be able to choose Sleep/Hibernate/Shutdown myself. Naive users need shutdown to mean shutdown. There are ZERO cases where it makes sense to have Fast-Startup enabled, either users are naive and need it to be a shutdown or they are not and they can choose Sleep/Hibernate/Shutdown themselves. This feature caused no end of trouble with the hundreds of users that I recently did phone/remote support for.

[@erica1399]

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.

[@ungratefulmonkey]

I enjoyed the entire video, but as a guy who has loaded in the bootstrap from front panel switches, I especially liked the explanation of the term "Boot".

[@frankmthompson]

Would love to see your take on the hot mess that is Modern Standby (S0) and the removal of other standby options. I've not found modern standby to be all that good and have had laptops wake up while in a bag resulting in overheating. To make it worse on some (maybe all) laptops that have S0 enabled, all other sleep options are not available.

[@stevenlynch3456]

I have had this issue too and it freaks me out, making me think it's going to catch on fire while **I** am sleeping, catching my house on fire (it's a very high wattage computer).

[@restaurantattheendofthegalaxy]

Right up my alley! I had a Toshiba laptop at work that did all of these sleep, hybernate, states, I really had to crack the manual to learn how to use it.

[@TerminalWorld]

Sooo... I was doing it right.

[@NatoBoram]

Clickbait as expected. Sigh.

[@jimmykrochmalska3501]

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

[@saltyowl3229]

I love how well dave puts into perspective that these well known concepts he covers were just something “a guy” made or added. Hate how some well known concepts and standards are things that some company thought would be profitable and forced into popularity.

[@davemould4638]

The hibernation file is a great resource for anyone who wants to know what you were doing at the time the PC last went into hibernation. If you were accessing encrypted data, it will all be there in its unencrypted state in the hibernation file, as will all the encryption keys, passwords etc that were active at the time the PC went into hibernation, and any documents you had open at the time.

[@xBINARYGODx]

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.

[@woswasdenni1914]

the irony is microsoft brought us fast boot exactly at a time where its no longer beneficial. thanks to modern hyperspeed storage the differences are well... irrelevant in any practical way. so lets introduce more complexity into errors to have single digit percent faster boot shall we

[@danman32]

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

[@fabiosemino2214]

@@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

[@MrCrashDavi]

It's beneficial because of WoL.

[@danman32]

@@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.

[@mikemx55]

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.

[@Niiixxxx]

On the first PC I had, a 486 DX-66 I actually used to enjoy watching the memory check as it literally counted the bytes of my 4MB ram. Imagine how exciting it was when I installed an additional 4MB and maxed out the 8 memory slots it had.

[@ArveEriksson]

First of all, I must say that our Nerd in Chief has given me a greater respect for Windows OSes. (... Except 11. And the window decoration in Win10. Bleh!) I still think Linux is more fun, though, quirks and instabilities and all. I never did read up on what Wake-On-LAN does, though. I've been educated! Not sure I approve of the creative approaches to shutting down, though... I can sort of see the reasoning, but let me effing shut down if I wanna!

[@noahwhalen3398]

Thanks for sharing Dave! I didn't know there were so many major differences between reboot & restart. Wake on LAN is pretty sweet. I've always liked the idea of WOL but never had a reason to implement it.

[@edmunns8825]

Thanks Dave, really informative video! I have to cold boot a fair bit (sometimes by choice, sometimes by malfunction) because I'm still learning how not to create memory leaks ;) It's amazing what you guys did with our operating systems, bloody good engineers. I still pull the plug a fair bit. It worries me a little we can't do that on modern smartphones without destroying them physically.

[@PhilA.Minion]

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.

[@acts9531]

On my main system, which pretty much runs everything on the property including surveillance and media server, I have it set to do a restart at 5:30 AM every day. This might be excessive but it always gives me a fresh load to start the day with and that's worked out well for me. It's worth the 15 minutes it takes to restart and fully load everything from scratch with fast boot/fast start disabled and a full fresh load of PCI and USB in the BIOS. This also incidentally reveals any impending hardware failures that might manifest on a power recycle. Better to find them in the morning when I can do something about them than have them randomly fail at unexpected times. When I do shut the machine down all the way for any reason I have the surge suppressor that serves the machine mounted where it's easy to get to. I just flip the switch on the surge suppressor which removes power completely from the machine, wait at least 30 seconds for the caps to drain and then reapply power to the system.

[@TAP7a]

“Pulling themselves up by the bootstraps” was always intended to be satirical - at the time in the Victorian era Malthusian philosophy was popular i.e. being poor was a choice and a moral failing. So, official policy on poverty was often shaped around this idea that a person could become a productive member of society on choice alone - if you just cleaned your room, took some responsibility and hustled then all your problems would go away, precisely as true then as it is now: misleading, naive and incomplete at best. To illustrate how ridiculous it was that policy aiming to solve a structural problem was entirely focused on individuals, the phrase was picked because of how obviously absurd it is. It’s only been “rehabilitated” relatively recently, and tbh I think I would prefer it with its older meaning

[@kcgunesq]

On the flip side, not cleaning your room, not taking responsibility and not hustling will pretty much doom you to a life of poverty.

[@Saavik256]

Ever heard of Baron Munchausen ?

[@allanrichardson9081]

To use mathematical terminology, hard work (or luck) is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for prosperity.

[@Intelwinsbigly]

@@kcgunesq Shhh, don't tell the truth to a Ieftist, at best it goes over their head.

[@disekjoumoer]

Thank you so much for the description of these states, Dave. I've known about them for a long time, but never been completely clear about them.

[@eccentricOrange]

I have a somewhat old machine and it seems to benefit from frequent restarting. I've set up Task Scheduler to run `shutdown /g` once a day (at 5 a.m.) and `shutdown /r` once a week. Did I mess up anywhere?

[@widicamdotnet]

Well... you wouldn't want it to reboot at 5AM if you use your computer overnight (leave programs open with unsaved files, or it gets accessed over the network etc.). If you save and close everything in the evening and it's purely a client machine, then why not just shut it down afterwards, and turn it back on in the morning?

[@TheXev]

I always disable Fast Startup so it acts like old school shut down. SSD's have made cold booting so much faster, that it no longer seems necessary to have Fast Startup enabled with an SSD anyway.

[@SlyNine]

Bit flips(solar radiation flipping ones and zeros) happens more frequently than people realize. It's a good practice to reboot once a week imo.

[@miguelguthridge]

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.

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@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.

[@blahorgaslisk7763]

@@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...

[@mikemx55]

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

[@blahorgaslisk7763]

@@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.

[@daelra]

You also have to add in the fact that laptops do things differently depending on whether they are plugged in or not when to put to sleep. I'm not sure if it's fixed yet but if you had one of those laptops with 'modern standby' (the successor to S3) and the laptop plugged in, closed the lid and then pulled the plug, it would remain in 'network connected' sleep mode and would be in some standby state that included leaving the wifi connected, allowing for background updates, wake on notifications, etc., (therefore draining your battery whilst it was in your bag). If you pulled the power before closing the lid, it would flip the standby mode to 'network disconnected' mode and put it to sleep properly. To diagnose (sadly, not fix), powercfg /a is your friend here as it will tell you if you're in 'network connected' or 'network disconnected'' mode. This was identified as an issue over a year or so ago hopefully those with more recent BIOS's might have this fixed but if not - *pull the plug before closing lid*

[@justincase5272]

"It came from on high." As the IT chief for our squadron, I implemented three policies: 1) Perform a full shut down at COB each and every day. 2) Before calling for tech support of any kind, perform a full shut down and reboot. 3) Anyone found with a game on their work computers would be reported to the commander. Call volume dropped by 80%.