Hands-On Tech 286 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Hands-On Tech, when you shut down your computer at night, is it actually off? Stay tuned. This is TWiT. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech. I am Mikah Sargent, and today we are answering your tech questions. Yes, if you have tech questions that you would like me to sing about, well, I need you to email me. hot@twit.tv is how you get in touch with me. and I would love to hear from you. This week's question comes in from Lorraine, and I am once again solving disputes between loved ones.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:42]:
It's great. So let's take a look at Lorraine's question. Mikah, my husband shuts down our Windows desktop every single night and has for years. He's very proud of this. So when the computer started acting sluggish, our daughter pulled up some screen in Task Manager and announced the PC had been up for 41 days straight. He says that's impossible because he turns it off every night. She says shutting down isn't the same as restarting, which sounds like nonsense to both of us. Who's right? Is there really a difference between shutdown and restart? And how often should we actually be restarting our computers and our phones for that matter? That's from Lorraine from Biloxi, Mississippi.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:31]:
Well, Lorraine, first and foremost, thank you for taking the time to write in. I have a verdict for you. Short answer is this: your daughter is right. And that Task Manager number, it's, it's not a glitch. It's actually kind of giving you some insight into what is happening here. Because on Windows, shutdown hasn't actually meant full shutdown since Windows 8. It saves the core of Windows to a file on disk and then reloads it the next morning. Restart is the only one of the 2 buttons that actually ends the session and starts Windows over.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:16]:
So let's get into it. The verdict up front is that, well, your daughter is correct and your husband is also correct about what he's been doing, but unfortunately wrong about what it's accomplishing. So it's not a matter of not realizing that you're using the right tools or not using the right tool. No, you, you're doing the right thing. It's just that what's actually happening behind the scenes is different. You've been pressing that button faithfully for years, or, you know, going through those processes faithfully for years, but you're never getting the thing that you thought you were getting. And 41 days isn't a bug. It's not a lie.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:51]:
It's not a stuck counter. It's an actual accurate measurement of what is going on behind the scenes. And so, you know, nobody— including your computer, has done anything wrong. It's kind of on Microsoft because the company changed what the word means and didn't really do a good job, I would argue, of explaining that to people. So let's kind of break this down. First and foremost, you have to understand that shutdown versus restart, these have 2 very different jobs. What we assume is that shutdown is going to end everything and then tomorrow it starts again from nothing. But that's not what's going on when it comes to the process here.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:44]:
It's the feature that's going on whenever you press shutdown, it's called Fast Startup. And so internally it's kind of like a hybrid shutdown and it's been the default behavior again since Windows 8. And Microsoft says, well, it's on by default in Windows. So on shutdown, what happens is every app closes, every user is signed out. And that part is sort of the shutdown part of the hybrid, you know, thing that's going on. And that's why it also looks and feels like one, right? But then Windows stops short of fully ending things instead of actually ending the kernel session. That's sort of the, the, the whole process that's happening behind the scenes. The core of Windows plus all of your drivers Well, those all get written into a hibernation file.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:37]:
And if you're curious, this hibernation file is called hyperfil.sys. And once it gets put into hyperfil.sys, it cuts the power. So here it is from Microsoft's own wording. During fast startup, the kernel session is not closed, but it is hibernated. Then the next morning, when you open up your machine, well, as you can imagine, it doesn't build Windows from scratch. It reads the file back into memory. It picks up the same session. And then Microsoft says a fast startup simply loads the hibernation file, hyperfil.sys, into memory.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:18]:
And that's sort of the magic trick that became a confusion trick for you. And it's why the machine can boot up so quickly. It's not sort of doing less work quickly. It's actually skipping that work entirely. It's not having to reload any of that. And, you know, these are the things where it's understandable that there can be some frustration that you don't— you haven't been told that this is the way that it works. But it is. It has been introduced as a speed feature because the problem with startup is that it takes a long time.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:55]:
It takes a really long time. And People did not like how long it took to start up a machine, and it should not take an incredibly long time to start up a machine. So this was just a way to kind of help with it. But it's important to understand too that when you are doing this, you have to be aware of how a non-shutdown, these sort of hibernation shutdowns, can make a difference. in terms of what needs to be done when you're having issues, when things are sluggish. So if we break into it kind of with fast startup versus restart, with shutdown, again, your apps close, so you're signed out. The Windows Core is saved, it's written to disk and not ended, and then it powers off, and on next boot, it reloads that Windows Core. When it comes to restart, It's important to understand that restart, your apps close just the same and you're signed out, but then the Windows core ends and nothing is carried over, okay? So it ends that kernel session we were talking about.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:09]:
Nothing saved, nothing carried over. The hibernation file isn't involved. Windows rebuilds itself from the actual system files. It does this thing called reenumeration of the hardware. It loads every driver fresh and says that— The fast startup setting does not apply to restart. Why? When you restart, you're presumably wanting a completely new Windows state. That's what restart means. So it keeps doing the full boot cycle on purpose.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:36]:
That's the point. And this is why we all say, all of us who know who you call whenever there's a tech question, say, have you restarted it? Have you turned it off and back on again? See, this is the thing. This is the thing. It used to be, have you turned it off and back on again? Right? Not in modern words. You gotta restart it because that's the only thing that's going to make it possible for the machine to end the process and start fresh. You might be wondering though, like, why is it That the counter continues to climb when it comes to uptime? Well, let's kind of take a look. You can, you all can try this at home to follow through this process. And Lorraine, hopefully you are also able to do so.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:32]:
So you can see how long you're, if you're out there watching this and you're wondering how long has my PC been up, if you go to Task Manager, Performance, CPU, and then look for uptime, That was the screen that your daughter probably pulled up. And uptime measures from the last time the kernel actually booted, not from the last time that the power light on the machine went out, right? It's not about shutdown, it's about restart or a true shutdown, which we'll get to. And then under fast startup, the kernel never booted again. It was paused to disk. and then resumed. So in that way, that clock is going to keep running through every nightly shutdown. 41 days of uptime across roughly 41 shutdowns means that Windows has, as far as it sees, been running continuously from, again, its own point of view since early August, if you, you know, had this happen recently. So here's something that can be helpful.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:33]:
If your uptime is longer than the last time that you remember restarting, then you know that Fast Startup is on and your shutdowns aren't doing what you think. Now, one thing to bear in mind for people watching, it's likely that that's the situation that's going on with Lorraine and Lorraine's machine, but Fast Startup is not on every machine. There are some PCs who have it but ship with it off, and It can't run if hibernation is disabled. So those are the machines where uptime resets do appear as you would expect them to. If you'd like to do a real update, well, that is— or rather a real reboot— that is possible. Instead of doing a shutdown, the easiest fix without messing with the settings is to just use restart instead of shutdown. Pick one night a week, right? And then make that the restart night. This is also fun.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:38]:
If you hold down the Shift key while you click Shutdown in that Start menu, then that one does a true full shutdown. Oh! Yes, you can actually shut it down that way. But if you want to feel a little bit like a hacker or a coder, there's another way to go as well. If you launch the command prompt, And you run shutdown /s /t 0, then what this does is it tells the machine that you are wanting to do a full shutdown. So this says, here's the shutdown I want you to do. It is this specific type of shutdown. And then how long until you do this shutdown? That's what the T is for, time. You're saying no time, I want you to do it right now.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:29]:
So that will actually do a true full shutdown. If you want to do a hybrid version, the kind that you are struggling with here, you can use that prompt with instead of the time afterward, shutdown /s/hybrid. But of course, the point is that you are trying to do a full shutdown that doesn't save anything to disk. There is a way— where there's a will, there's a way— to go in and completely reset the process so that it's not using that hibernation mode. If you go into your Control Panel, you go into Hardware and Sound, Power Options, And then choose what the power buttons do. So these physical power buttons, you can change the settings that are currently unavailable and uncheck turn on fast startup. Okay. That means that, as you will imagine, it's not going to do that hibernation mode, but please be aware that Microsoft does have some warnings about this.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:41]:
Microsoft's own doc says that disabling fast startup is not recommended and turning it off means giving up the fast boot every single day. whenever you could solve this quote-unquote problem by just making sure that you restart once a week, right? So I personally don't recommend turning off fast startup. It is a built-in feature of the operating system at this point. And if you're watching this and you're a Mac owner, well, none of this applies to you. Shutdown on a Mac is shutdown and It's only during sleep that the Mac is doing different activities, uh, through a means called Power Nap to kind of keep doing updates and things. So, you know, the only thing that I guess would apply there is if you never do a restart on your Mac, but if you're shutting down your Mac, then again, it's not, it's not an issue because it doesn't have that. So. Let's go then to the what is causing the sluggishness.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:47]:
Is this why there's sluggishness? Well, you've got sort of 41 days of buildup, and when you do the faux shutdown, the hybrid shutdown, it isn't clearing out some of that buildup, right? If you do a real restart, it clears out memory. That an app has requested and never returned to the system, and that can kind of add up quietly. And, you know, depending, it may not show up quite clearly in Task Manager. Also, if you have drivers that are running and they're not working exactly right— a printer, a graphics driver, a USB controller, they got confused— those can stay stuck in that bad state. If you have updates that have been installed, but they continue to wait on a reboot so they can do their job, well, hybrid shutdown isn't going to take care of that. You need to reboot the machine. And then of course, weeks of kind of background clutter that comes from background processes and handles that pile up over weeks of resumed sessions. So with one click, you can clear out all that cruft.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:06]:
All you need to do is restart and then use it for a day and see if things are better after that day. Don't go worrying about buying RAM or, you know, completely reinstalling your operating system. You probably don't need to. You probably just need to reboot the machine. As for phones, Well, phones, it kind of— they work differently, right? Because first and foremost, we tend not to turn off our phones these days. You know, you, uh, you could probably look at someone's uptime on their phone and it would be measured in months, not, uh, not weeks and not days. I did look into some guides online, and of course we'll include links in the show notes. The National Security— The National Security— Yes, the National Security Agency's mobile device best practices sheet.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:55]:
It's a one-pager, and one of the items on on it is this: power the device off and on weekly. NSA has its mitigation chart and says that the weekly power cycle is credited against spear phishing and zero-click exploits because when you're shutting down your device and turning it back on, it can't really stay on the phone. A lot of phone malware, especially the zero-click kind that costs organizations a bunch of money to be able to run, it lives in memory. It doesn't survivor reboot. So power cycling evicts the bad code from your device. Of course, that isn't a substitute, right, for updates, and it won't undo a malicious app that you installed. So definitely update the software, and then maybe once, you know, once a week you, you turn off the phone and turn it back on again. And also, it's important to understand that a reboot fixes A phone that stopped getting, you know, it stopped working in some ways.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:03]:
There could be that you're not getting mail. It could be that there's a cell connection weirdness, or maybe your phone's getting hot a lot and it's not because you've just recently updated. These things can also be fixed by a reset. I've talked before about how to go through the process of doing a full shutdown or a full reboot, and so you can, you know, take that option as well. All right, let's look at the habits that you probably want to kind of follow along with when it comes to a Windows PC. Weekly is a good habit for when to reset, right? Plus, of course, whenever Windows Update asks for one. Don't keep saying no to the reboot from Windows Update. You need to do that.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:58]:
Your phone, according to the NSA, good idea to turn that off and back on again once a week. Do I do that? No, but it couldn't hurt. And then of course, outside of this, if you've got anything that's behaving oddly, make sure you restart, like a full reboot, a full restart. Because that can sometimes clear out whatever's going on. It's the best troubleshooting step. I know it seems like a lazy troubleshooting step, but it is the best troubleshooting step. So much can be resolved just by doing that. And also it's free, right? You don't have to take it into someone and pay them to fix it.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:36]:
So restart beats shutdown every time. That's the rule. That's the thing to remember. If you're only going to press one button, press the reboot button, because at least then you can count on whatever machine it is actually doing the thing of completely shutting down and restarting and not doing the thing of saving your session in memory and restarting that way. So my verdict, the daughter, your daughter is correct because— On Windows, shutdown saves the core of the system to disk and then resumes it afterward. Restart is the only one that ends it and starts over. That 41 days, remember, that's a real actual measurement. We're not, we're not dealing with the machine acting up.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:28]:
It's not a bug. And I would say that it's probably why the PCs run a little sluggish. So just restart once a week. Leave fast startup alone. And then apparently, according to the NSA, not a bad idea to also do so on your phone. Folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Hands-On Tech. I want to thank you so much, uh, Lorraine, for taking the time to write in. If you have questions out there, you can email me too.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:01]:
hot@twit.tv is how you get in touch, and I'll be back again next with another episode of Hands-On Tech. Bye-bye!