WIndows 10 How often to power down, or cold boot?

ssal

Active Member
I have my desktop go to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. I basically do not shut it down.

My understanding is that every so often, cold booting the machine will clear whatever cache or garbage that may accumulate during use, so it is good to cold boot it once in a while.

Do you power down, or cold boot your machine, and what's your frequency?
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
During the day I leave my pc on and turn if off at night. I don't use sleep or hibernate, just set monitor to shut off after so long of inactivity. And yes you should restart it every so often.
 

jevery

Active Member
Mine hasn't been off for months - Just push the sleep button when I walk away and the space bar when I return.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
I use sleep primarily as well, although occasionally it starts exhibiting weird issues after a couple of weeks which is cleared up via reboot.
 

strollin

Well-Known Member
I have 2 PCs that I don't reboot unless absolutely necessary. I have both setup to blank the monitor after 10 minutes, otherwise on all the time.
 

OmniDyne

Active Member
Sleep on the weekends when I'm on and off my PC. During the week I shut it down while at work. I always shut it down at night because certain programs always wake the damn thing (Steam especially).

I have Fast Startup disabled so I don't ever have to restart to fix weird issues that arise from always shutting down.
 

OmniDyne

Active Member
Can you elaborate on this statement? How does Fast Startup fix weird issues?

Fast startup causes issues. Fast startup is like a hybrid hibernate. What this means is that when fast startup is enabled and you shut down your computer, Windows saves its current state to a hibernation file; this saves time on reboot for desktops or laptops utilizing hard disks. However, because Windows is never truly shut down, over time stuff starts acting wonky or just refuses to work at all because Windows isn't entering a fresh state at boot.

If you disable fast startup, each time you shut down your computer and reboot, it's as if it were restarted.

If you utilize an SSD as a boot drive, fast startup doesn't seem to provide a noticeable difference in boot times in my experience, so I always disable it on any computer that utilizes an SSD.

We disable fast startup at our facility because all of our clients shut down their computers before leaving; we were running into the problem of people not restarting their computers because they thought they were refreshing the system by shutting down at night. We've had a wide range of strange issues from NICs just disappearing to printers not functioning, to the start menu not appearing. Once we received the ticket and went to the computer, the first thing we'd do is restart and 9 out of 10 times it fixed the issue.

Disabling fast startup just eliminates a massive headache for us.
 

OmniDyne

Active Member
I checked my BIOS. Fast startup was disabled. Thanks.

My apologies, I wasn't clear enough. The fast startup I'm talking about is in Windows.

Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options > Choose what the power buttons do

You'll see 'Turn on fast startup'.
 

ssal

Active Member
My apologies, I wasn't clear enough. The fast startup I'm talking about is in Windows.

Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options > Choose what the power buttons do

You'll see 'Turn on fast startup'.
The "Turn on fast startup (recommended)" is checked, but grayed out, so I can't change it.
 
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