Event details
A colleague of mine installed an application at the end of the day on Friday and then shut down his computer. When he started it up today, the app wasn't working. Sure enough, the app required a restart, and apparently Fast Startup is still a thing that is enabled by default in Windows 11.
The setting is not exposed anywhere in the modern Settings app; you have to go into the legacy Control Panel to turn it off. And apart from a couple mentions in the developer section, Microsoft's documentation doesn't acknowledge it at all. Every search result I found about how to turn it off is on a third-party web site.
If I'm not mistaken, it isn't even possible to disable Fast Startup with a standard GPO or an Intune configuration policy; you have to use a GPP or a script to set the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power\HiberbootEnabled registry value to 0.
And while I concede the feature had some benefit in the days of spinning rust, the speedup on SSD-based machines is so negligable as to be unnoticable.
So, uh, what gives? 🙂
MicrosoftRyanSteele-CoV​ - Intune has a setting to disable Hibernate with Power Policy CSP | Microsoft Learn which is in the Settings catalog. Just be aware in the policy note that it does not override any powercfg configurations or if you manually set the HibernateEnabled setting.
Thanks EricMoe​. However, wouldn’t this disable the Hibernation feature entirely? Couldn’t that result in someone losing work if their laptop runs out of battery?
I am interested to understand why Fast Startup still exists and is enabled by default.
- EricMoe
The policy would disable Hibernate entirely. There is no fidelity of control to just disable the Fast Startup feature (which relies on Hibernate). Ultimately it's left on because it cuts boot time significantly which is one of our biggest end user experience metrics. It's a good ask for being able to turn off in certain scenarios, but disabling across the organization could optimize for the edge case (user shut down versus restarted and something like an app or driver did not load properly) while (possibly) hurting the common case of improved startup time.