[2 Ways] How to Enable Fast Startup in Windows 10

What is fast startup?

Fast Startup in Windows 10 is similar to the sleep mode of Windows and is turned on by default during Windows installation on most laptops and desktops. When you shut down the PC instead of closing everything in RAM, Windows will save the image of your operating system to a hibernation file. When you boot up the system again, the file is reloaded, making your boot time even faster. That's the way how fast startup works.

Due to its working principle, fast startup is welcomed by many users as a method to speed up the boot time of Windows. In the below content, we'll be going to talk about the detailed steps to enable fast startup in Windows 10 or 11.

How to enable fast startup in Windows 10?

Windows offers two methods for turning on fast startup: Control Panel and Registry Editor. You can choose one of the two built-in ways to enable fast boot Windows 11 or 10.

Way 1. Enable fast startup in Windows 10 using Control Panel

The easiest way to have fast startup enabled on a Windows 10 PC is by using Settings in Control Panel.

Step 1. Search for "Control Panel" on your computer and open it.

Step 2. Click "Hardware and Sound".

Step 3. Click on "Change what the power buttons do" under "Power Options".

Step 3. On the next screen, scroll down to "Shutdown Settings".

✍ Note: If there is no "Turn on fast startup" option, you can go to the command prompt to enable hibernation mode:
1. Type "Command Prompt" on the search bar and run it as administrator.
2. Input the "powercfg/hibernate on" command and hit "Enter". 

Step 4. Tick the "Turn on fast startup" option and click on "Save Changes" to enable fast boot on your Windows 10 computer.

Way 2. Enable fast startup in Windows 10 using Registry Editor

The steps of using Registry Editor to turn on fast startup are more complicated. If you are not a sophisticated computer user, you are likely to edit in Registry Editor wrongly. But don’t worry, here are the steps in detail.

Step 1. Press the "window + R" keys to launch Run dialog, and input "regedit" to open Windows 10 Registry Editor.

Step 2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Power. Find the HiberbootEnabled key on the right-side pane and double-click on it.

Step 3. In the pop-up Edit DWORD (32-bit) Value dialog, change its value to 1 and click "OK" to enable fast startup in Windows 10.

Tip: To turn off the fast startup, change its value to 0 and click "OK".

Recommended reading: How to make Windows 10 boot faster

In the previous content, we focus on how to enable fast startup in Windows 10 to shorten Windows boot time. We also provide other three methods below accessible and feasible to make Windows 10 boot faster.

1. Disable startup programs

When you start up your PC, startup programs are loaded automatically, eating up your memory on the background. If there are lots of startup programs, it takes a long time to make your Windows 10 boot successfully.

To disable startup applications, you can do as follows:

Step 1. Press "Ctrl+Alt+Del" simultaneously and choose "Task Manager".

Step 2. In the pop-up dialogue, click the Startup tab, and all the startup apps will be listed.

Step 3. Right-click the program that you don't want to load automatically while booting and choose "Disable".

2. Clean up disk space

A disk with sufficient space will offer Windows a good environment to run. To make sure there is enough space on your hard drive, the easiest way is to clean up junk files from time to time. Windows 10 has a free PC cleaner called Disk Cleanup to help clean up disk space.

Step 1. Type "disk cleanup" in the search box, and hit "Enter".

Step 2. Select the drive you want to clean like C drive and click "OK".

Step 3. And then, tick the files you want to move and click "OK" to begin the cleaning.

3. Upgrade to SSD from HDD

There are two kinds of disks: SSD vs. HDD. Considering transfer speed, a solid-state drive has more advantages over a hard disk drive. Therefore, it's an ideal thought to upgrade the HDD to SSD to increase the speed of booting.

Here, it's recommended to use third-party disk cloning software called AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional to complete the upgrade. Its "Disk Clone" feature allows you to transfer all data from HDD to SSD so that you don't need to reinstall everything including Windows after changing.

Step 1. Connect the new drive to your PC. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Go to "Clone" and "Clone Disk".

Step 2. In the "Select Disk Clone Method" window, choose "Clone Disk Quickly" which will clone only used space to another disk.

Step 3. Select your old hard disk drive as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 4. Then select your new SSD as the destination disk and click "Next". Remember to tick "Optimize the performance of SSD" to align 4K partition.

Step 5. Then, you can edit the partition size on the new drive. Select the one you like and click "Next".

Step 6. After reading a note about how to boot from the destination disk, click "Finish" and then click "Apply" to commit the operation.

Conclusion

To sum up, you can learn two ways to enable fast startup in Windows 10 or 11 from this passage. If you want to make your Windows 10 boot faster, you can still refer to the other three methods demonstrated in this post. Aside from what we have talked about, you can also try uninstalling unused applications, updating device drivers, moving programs from C drive to D drive, upgrading to a new operating system, etc.