HOW FAST BOOT WORKS

When you switch on a Windows 7 machine, it always starts from a “cold boot,” which has to load Windows from scratch. With the advent of modern PC hardware and the launch of Windows 8.1 (and now Windows 10), supported PCs can be instructed to switch on Fast Boot instead. This uses “hybrid shutdown,” a feature that effectively hibernates your PC, rather than shutting it down completely, by storing the contents of memory in a special file, called hiberfil.sys. When starting back up, the file is loaded back into memory—a much quicker process than starting Windows completely from scratch.