How to Make Windows 10 Boot Faster

Windows 10 is already an extraordinary success story for Microsoft and managed to achieve 110 million user installs in just two months. This is absolutely staggering and illustrates the huge amount of users migrating from older operating systems. Clearly, the free upgrade incentive is working wonders but there are still some concerns regarding privacy, and I’ve experienced a number of software bugs. On my own personal system, the Start Menu, Photos application and Windows Explorer stops functioning after the system powers on after sleep. This is infuriating and happened on quite a few occasions.

As with any new operating system, the software glitches will be rectified and it’s just a matter of patience. Another complaint regarding Windows 10 is the boot times on SSDs. While it’s not slow, booting in some cases can take longer than Windows 8/8.1. Thankfully, Lifehacker reported on a hidden setting which dramatically improves boot times.

To enable fast startup, please follow these instructions:

1. “Search for and open “Power options” in the Start Menu.
2. Click “Choose what the power buttons do” on the left side of the window.
3. Click “Change settings that are currently unavailable.”
4. Under “Shutdown settings” make sure “Turn on fast startup” is enabled.”

As you can see from the screenshot, this doesn’t affect restart times but should theoretically improve cold boot times by a significant margin. Furthermore, the majority of PCs which have a fresh install will have this setting disabled. As a result, it’s certainly worth taking the time to enable fast startup.

Have you experienced any problems with Windows 10?