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.
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This only works on 98 95 and win me, it hasnt worked since win 2k and doesnt on vista or xp
No david …working vista and xp
Doesn’t work in xp
Tom working xp.. Please select Shut Down. And shift key..
Win XP SP2, doesn’t work.
Unless you have to, it is many times advantageous to “warm boot”, or rather warm reboot, Windows. In a warm reboot, Windows restarts, but the computer doesn’t, skipping the whole pre-Windows boot screen/BIOS/startup sequence. You an easily specify a warm boot in both Windows XP and Windows Vista. Just hold down SHIFT on your keyboard before clicking “Restart” in Vista, or before clicking OK in the restart dialog in XP. Enjoy the extra 20 seconds!
thats great to know – i’ll be doing that for sure from now on.
Doesn’t work on my XP SP2. Nothing happens when I click OK while I’m holding down the SHIFT key, after having chosen the ‘Restart’ option from the Shutdown dialog.
RESTARTIN WINDOWS WITHOUT RESTARTING COMPUTER…….. it didnt work for me either – it just restarted the computer as usual. and im runnig Windows Vista Basic….. ?????????
Didn’t work for me either, on a xp sp2.
as my home pc is frequently restarting…..
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).
not sure about it
Doesn’t work on vista.
No go with vista
holding the shift key down and clicking restart does nothing i’m running vista premium, timed it with shift key and without no differance.
NO, its DOES NOT work JASON. Hasn’t since ’98. Did you even try it before you posted this? Even the original guy who posted this on the web has retracted his statement. Before you post something, how about you actually TRY it first??
It doesn’t work at all !
My system Resatrting actumaticly and its say CTRL+ALT+DEL
in dos mode
please give me solution.
Did not work on XP ! Lame
to restart windows without restarting…just do the following
open taskmanager and switch to processes and end the process explorer.exe…Don’t think about the warning u receive..