How to Disable 'Fast Startup' (Which Causes Driver Bugs)

What Fast Startup Actually Does

Fast Startup (enabled by default on most Windows 10 and 11 installs) is often mistaken for a "faster boot" feature, but what it really does is turn a full shutdown into something closer to hibernation. When you shut down, Windows logs out all users and closes apps normally, but instead of fully powering down the kernel and unloading drivers, it freezes the Windows kernel session and loaded drivers into a hiberfile (C:\hiberfil.sys) and writes that to disk. On the next boot, Windows restores that frozen kernel state instead of initializing everything from scratch — which does shave a few seconds off boot time, but it also means every driver in memory at shutdown gets reloaded exactly as it was, bugs and all, rather than getting a clean re-initialization.

This causes real, reproducible problems:

• BIOS/UEFI settings changes not taking effect — because the machine never actually does a full POST-to-OS cold boot, firmware-level changes (boot order, virtualization settings, etc.) can appear to not apply until you reboot rather than shut down.
• Failure to enter BIOS/UEFI setup — some systems' boot-key timing gets thrown off because the boot path skips the normal firmware initialization sequence.
• Network adapters, GPUs, or USB devices misbehaving after "shutdown" — a driver that crashed or leaked memory before shutdown gets restored in that same broken state.
• Dual-boot filesystem corruption — if you dual-boot Linux, Fast Startup leaves the Windows disk partition in a "hibernated" state that Linux can't safely mount read-write, which is the single most common cause of Windows partitions showing as corrupted or read-only from a Linux install.
• Disk/BitLocker/driver update issues — some updates that need a genuine cold boot to fully apply don't take effect properly when Fast Startup skips real driver reinitialization.

Disabling Fast Startup

1. Open Control Panel (search for it in the Start menu — this setting isn't in the modern Settings app).
2. Go to Hardware and Sound > Power Options.
3. Click Choose what the power buttons do in the left sidebar.
4. Click Change settings that are currently unavailable near the top (requires administrator access).
5. Under Shutdown settings, uncheck Turn on fast startup (recommended).
6. Click Save changes.

Alternative: Disable via Command Line

You can disable Fast Startup entirely, along with hibernation, in one command from an elevated Command Prompt or PowerShell — useful for scripting across multiple machines:

powercfg /hibernate off

This removes the hiberfil.sys file and disables both hibernation and Fast Startup together, since Fast Startup depends on the hibernation subsystem. If you want to keep hibernation available (for laptops that use it for sleep/resume) but disable only Fast Startup, use the Control Panel method above instead — it's more surgical.

Alternative: Registry Edit

For deploying across many machines via script or Group Policy preference, you can set the same value directly in the registry:

reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power" /v HiberbootEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Setting HiberbootEnabled to 0 disables Fast Startup; setting it back to 1 re-enables it. This is the same registry value the Control Panel checkbox controls.

Confirming It's Off

After disabling it, shut down the PC completely (not restart), wait a few seconds, and power back on. A genuine cold boot with Fast Startup off will noticeably take a bit longer than before — that's expected and confirms the setting took effect, since drivers and the kernel are now initializing fresh instead of resuming from a frozen state.

Should You Disable It?

For most desktop users who rarely touch BIOS settings and don't dual-boot, Fast Startup causes no visible problems and the few extra seconds of boot time it saves are a reasonable tradeoff. You should specifically disable it if:

• You dual-boot with Linux or any other OS that also mounts the Windows partition.
• You're troubleshooting a driver, GPU, network adapter, or USB issue that "goes away" after a restart but comes back after a shutdown/power-on cycle.
• You just changed a BIOS/UEFI setting and it doesn't seem to be taking effect.
• You're having trouble entering BIOS/UEFI setup by pressing the key during boot.