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Emanuele Bartolesi
Emanuele Bartolesi

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⚡ Turn On or Off Fast Startup in Windows 11

#windows #productivity

Since few months my primary laptop is a Microsoft Laptop 6 (you can see my entire setup on my website https://www.emanuelebartolesi.com/uses).
In the last few weeks I had a lot of performace issues with the laptop.
I thought it was something related the tools I am using for working (LM Studio and other dev tools), but actually I was wrong.
I did a lot of research around and finally I discovered that my issue is the Fast Startup on Windows 11.

Fast Startup helps your PC boot up faster after shutdown by combining the cold boot and hibernation processes. While it’s convenient, it can sometimes cause issues with dual-boot setups or device drivers (primarily Intel).

🧠 Understanding Fast Startup

There are three types of startup modes in Windows:

  • Cold Boot – Traditional full startup (everything initializes from scratch).
  • Wake-from-Hibernation – Restores your previous session from disk.
  • Fast Startup – A hybrid approach combining both.

When you shut down your PC with Fast Startup enabled, Windows logs off all user sessions but saves the system state (drivers, kernel session) to a file called:

C:\hiberfil.sys
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At the next boot, Windows reads this file instead of reinitializing everything — resulting in a noticeably faster startup.

💡 Note: Fast Startup depends on Hibernate. If hibernation is disabled, Fast Startup won’t work.

🧩 Step 1 — Check if Fast Startup is On or Off (PowerShell)

  1. Open Windows Terminal as Administrator (right-click Start → Windows Terminal (Admin)).

  2. Run the following command:

   (Get-ItemProperty "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power").HiberbootEnabled
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  1. Check the result:
  • 1 → Fast Startup is Enabled
  • 0 → Fast Startup is Disabled

⚙️ Step 2 — Turn Fast Startup On or Off (Control Panel)

  1. Open the Control Panel (press Win + R, type control, and hit Enter).

  2. Go to:
    Hardware and Sound → Power Options → Choose what the power buttons do

  3. Click Change settings that are currently unavailable.

  4. Under Shutdown settings, you’ll see:

✅ Turn on fast startup (recommended)

  1. To enable Fast Startup → check the box.
    To disable it → uncheck the box.

  2. Click Save changes.

Turn on fast startup (recommended)

🧰 Step 3 — (Optional) Enable Hibernate if Needed

If you don’t see the “Turn on fast startup” option, Hibernate might be disabled. Enable it using PowerShell:

powercfg /hibernate on
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If you only want to use Fast Startup and not full hibernation, you can reduce the hiberfile size:

powercfg /h /type reduced
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This keeps Fast Startup working but saves disk space.

🧹 Step 4 — Disable Hibernate (Also Disables Fast Startup)

If you want to completely disable both Hibernate and Fast Startup:

powercfg /hibernate off
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This removes the C:\hiberfil.sys file and disables related features.

🙋‍♂️ Hey, I'm Emanuele — you might know me online as Kasuken.

👨‍💻 Senior Cloud Engineer | Microsoft MVP (12x) | GitHub Star (4x)

🛠️ I build things with .NET, Azure, AI, and GitHub

🌈 Turning code into 🦖 and 🦄 — one commit at a time

🚀 If you're into .NET, GitHub, DevOps, or just cool side projects,

feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn

P.S. I break things so you don’t have to. 😉

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