This new feature in the Fall Creators Update is taking many by surprise…

If you’ve got the Fall Creators Update on your Windows 10 PC, then you’ve probably noticed a new feature that Microsoft is calling “Fast Startup.” The feature claims to improve the speed of your boot times, so you spend less time waiting on your PC to boot and more time working, being productive. Windows has this feature enabled by default, so if you’re using the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, then, you’re likely booting faster than you were before, and have likely noticed it.

Most users will like the faster booting times, but there are a few things about it that you should know so you can decide if you want to disable it or not. Understanding how it works, is going to go a long way to getting you to this decision.

Normally, when you shut your PC down, you do what many call a “cold shutdown.” Here, you save everything to your hard drive or SSD, close all the programs and kill the power. RAM is cleared. When you turn the PC back on, it loads everything back on the drive BACK into RAM in order for it to function as intended. That’s the way everyone is used to having “shut down” work on their PC.

When users have Fast Startup enabled, the computer doesn’t shut down, per se. It really hibernates instead.

Fast Startup saves all of your active data to a hibernation file before turning off. When you turn it back on, it reads in the hibernation file, putting you back to where you were before it shut down. Interestingly enough, Fast Startup can only be enabled if your PC has the ability to hibernate, AND then only if hibernation is enabled.

So, this brings you up and down quicker. That’s good right? Right?

Well… not always. There are some times when you really might want it disabled.

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