I am sure you have been asked at some point to reboot your computer to see if it fixes an issue you may have been having or just to “freshen” things up.
Some people choose to select the Restart option in Windows and others Shutdown and then turn the computer back on.
Historically whichever option you chose would result in the same thing from a technical point of view, however that is NOT the case if you are running Windows 8 or Windows 10.
In order to make a Windows computer boot up quicker, Microsoft introduced a “Fast Boot” feature in Windows 8 that has been carried into Windows 10 and is enabled by default.
To make this feature work, Microsoft configured Windows so that it saves some settings to the computer’s hard drive when you select the Shutdown option. When you then power the computer back on, that information is read from the hard drive and loaded into the computer’s memory helping Windows to start up and be ready to use faster.
Whilst that is a good thing most of the time, it does means that if you select Shutdown and then power back up a Windows 8 or Windows 10 computer, you are not actually “refreshing” all of the system and therefore issues that might have been fixed in Windows 7 by performing that procedure will no longer be.
If you are running Windows 8 or Windows 10 and have problems and decide to try a reboot or are asked to perform a reboot by us, it is very important that you choose the Restart option from within Windows and not Shutdown to ensure Windows is fully refreshed.
It is also a good idea to Restart your computer on a regular basis even if you shut it down at night. This ensures updates can be properly applied and should help general performance of your computer.