Hello readers! I thought this topic was very intriguing and decided to make a post on it. This is one of the examples where tech companies put some things in a piece of software or hardware, and have the hardware do something else, which is either to mask weaknesses in hardware or improve the user experience. Apple is known to be one company that does this quite often, but today's topic is about Microsoft.
Fast Startup in Windows:
The feature of fast startup was implemented in Windows 8 and carried over to Windows 10. This feature improves boot times in devices with slow HDD Boot Drives. What fast startup does is move whatever data Windows has in RAM to the boot drive. This includes all the fundamental parts of the operating system such as Start Menu, Taskbar and your Wallpaper. The advantage of fast startup is that the OS can be loaded directly from one place where all files from RAM are stored. Also, a standard Windows 10 Installation can be upto 15GB. But, it only stores about 1.5GB of data on RAM. So, a boot drive will be able to load the OS much quicker than otherwise. This also reduces wear and tear on a Hard Drive, if it is your boot drive. On some versions of Windows, it is enabled by default.
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| Shutdown settings in Control Panel |
Ironically, Fast startup is already available in the form of Hibernate mode. But, there are some differences between the two. Firstly, fast startup doesn't transfer any applications that you may have open to the boot drive. Only the fundamental parts of the Operating System are 'paged' (a term used for transferring something from RAM into the boot drive) to the boot drive on fast stratup. But when you use Hibernate mode, all your data on RAM is transferred into the boot drive, including all your applications, settings, Operatng System, unsaved work and errors which brings me into the disadvantages of using fast startup or hibernate mode.
When data is moved from RAM to your boot drive, everything gets copied including errors. So, if you shutdown your computer with fast startup enabled, Any errors that your computer caused will not be fixed. This is why some people turn fast startup off as the first thing they do when they get a new computer. Also, if you had loaded some program by mistake and it stays in RAM in the background, some amount of that data will end up being paged. This increases RAM usage, potentially slowing your computer down. Another disadvantage of fast startup is that it takes longer to shutdown. Instead of saving your work only, the boot drive will get caught up in saving all your data that was in RAM, increasing the risk of timing out on a UPS, if you're on a desktop in a power outage. Another problem with fast startup is that on modern computers that have fast SSD's, fast startup doesn't make enough difference to be noticeable.
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| Fast startup visualised |
Fast startup is therefore a feature that not many people know about, but it just makes our lives a little bit easier, even if it doesn't sometimes. Since people click restart to correct any computer errors, clicking restart will properly shutdown the computer before powering it up again whereas Shutdown (counter-intuitively), doesn't shut the computer down, but rather moves the data from RAM into the boot drive, and loads that data for faster startup. Thanks for reading and as always, stick around for another post.
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