When you had to wait for a mechanical hard drive to load your operating system and applications, fast start-up made sense. Today, however, Fast Start-up isn’t worth the trouble. I’ve seen it cause all sorts of strange problems that were difficult to narrow down.
Unless you’re booting your PC from a mechanical hard drive still, you should disable it completely.
Fast Start-up solves a problem we don’t have anymore
SSDs are fast enough
Under the hood, Windows Fast Start-up is very similar to hibernation. Instead of actually closing the OS when you “shut down,” Windows saves the kernel and driver state to your disk and just reloads it when you turn the PC back on. It was designed to speed up boot times when most PCs were using spinning hard drives.
In 2026, almost every PC is running a solid-state drive (SSD) of some kind. With an SSD, cold boot times are already extremely short. My PC boots in less than 20 seconds, and even an older SATA SSD will easily get you to the desktop in less than 45 seconds. The amount of time you actually save by using Fast Start-up on modern hardware is barely noticeable.
- Storage capacity
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2TB
- Hardware Interface
-
PCIE x 4
- Compatible Devices
-
Laptop, Motherboards
- Brand
-
Western Digital
- TBW
-
7300 MB/s
- Dimensions
-
3.15″L x 0.87″W x 0.09″Th
The WD_Black 2TB SSD is great for gaming. It offers read speeds of up to 7,300 mb/s and features an optional heatsink. The drive includes the wd_black dashboard software for monitoring health and customizing RGB lighting on compatible models.
Shutting down is sometimes necessary
The real issue comes from the fact that Fast Start-up isn’t a true shutdown. When you click Shut Down with Fast Start-up enabled, the Windows kernel stays partially loaded and drivers are kept in their current state. Despite the speed gains, that sometimes introduces problems.
I’ve run into more situations than I can count where a true restart is the easiest way to fix things. Whether you’re installing new drivers, applying system updates, or trying to clear out a bugged driver state, you need a “clean slate.”
Why Does Rebooting a Computer Fix So Many Problems?
Ask a geek how to fix a problem you’ve having with your Windows computer and they’ll likely ask “Have you tried rebooting it?” This seems like a flippant response, but rebooting a computer can actually solve many problems.
Fast Start-up gets in the way of all of that. You might notice that some updates don’t seem to stick until you do a full restart, or that bugs you’d expect to resolve after shutting down your PC and turning it back on stick around.
The classic advice to “turn it off and on again” is great, but if you have Fast Start-up enabled, shutting down and powering back on doesn’t actually reboot the system—it just resumes with all the bugs in place.
Fast start-up makes troubleshooting a pain
The single most important part of troubleshooting any problem is eliminating variables—the fewer things you have at play, the easier it is to narrow things down.
Unfortunately, Fast Start-up adds a variable that often makes troubleshooting harder.
Fast Start-up can cause all sorts of weird hardware glitches like docks that don’t refresh correctly, USB peripherals that fail to initialize (my webcam consistently breaks), or network adapters that go missing. As often as not, those problems stem from a driver issue, or Windows won’t recognize a change in a device state because it was effectively working with outdated information.
You end up with inconsistent behavior and digging through logs to solve a problem that would be solved by a normal shutdown.
Getting to the BIOS is more complicated than it should be
Fast Start-up also makes getting into your BIOS a bit more difficult. Normally, you just power on the PC and rapidly tap F2 or Delete to enter the BIOS. When Fast Start-up is active, the system skips parts of the initialization process so quickly that the window to press those keys often disappears entirely.
How to Enter the BIOS on Your Windows 11 PC
Accessing the BIOS (or UEFI) can help you in several situations.
Instead of pressing one key, you have to navigate through Windows recovery menus or trigger Advanced Startup by Shift+Clicking Restart just to reach your BIOS.
Disabling Fast Start-up on Windows 11
You won’t miss it
To disable Fast Start-up, search for Control Panel in the Start Menu search bar, then select the appropriate result.
Once the Control Panel is open, navigate to Power Options > Choose what the power buttons do, then untick the box next to “Turn on fast start-up.” If you’re using the Category view in Control Panel, you’ll find Power Options under Hardware and Sound.
You may need to click “Change settings that are currently unavailable” before Windows allows you to disable Fast start-up.
Fast Start-up isn’t worth it in 2026
Fast Start-up was a reasonable option for mechanical hard drives since they were painfully slow, but that speed bottleneck doesn’t exist anymore. Rather, it now just serves as a minor inconvenience at best or a potential source of glitches at worst.
If you want your system to be ready to use more quickly, you’re better off reducing the number apps that launch automatically—that’ll allow Windows to be ready to use much more quickly.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
