Restarting Windows Without Restarting Your PC
A modern PC with Vista Home Edition takes about one and a half minutes to boot. An older machine with XP is about the same. That’s 30 seconds for the PC itself (the BIOS) to boot up, plus a minute for the Windows operating system to boot. Sometimes, you need to reboot Windows (e.g. when installing new software), but there is no need to restart BIOS, too. However, the default is to reboot both. (That’s called doing a “cold boot,” rather than a “warm boot.”) There’s a trick that works on both XP and Vista to get it to do a warm boot instead, thus saving you 30 seconds per cycle.
The trick is to hold down the SHIFT key when invoking the restart.
Windows Vista: Select Start, then hover over the right arrow that is to the right of the padlock icon until the pop-up menu appears that contains “restart” as one of it’s choices. Hold down the SHIFT key while clicking on the “restart” choice.
Windows XP: Select Start. Select “Shut Down…”. Change the drop-down combo box under “What do you want the computer to do?” to “Restart”. Hold down the SHIFT key while clicking on the “OK” button.
Tags:bios, cold_boot, Computer, reboot_windows, shift_key, shut_down, warm_boot, Windows, windows vista, windows xp
April 28th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
not sure about it
April 5th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Didn’t work with WXP SP2. On a slightly related note, Shift-Del bypasses the Recycle Bin when deleting. Don’t use unless you really don’t want it because you won’t be able to restore the file(s).
February 28th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
as my home pc is frequently restarting…..
February 12th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Didn’t work for me either, on a xp sp2.
January 27th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
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January 4th, 2008 at 4:41 am
computer
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:21 pm
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