A: Whenever you’re running Windows 8, unless you take explicit steps to the contrary.
When someone described how Win8 radically improved its boot time by ‘hibernating’ the system (but not user) context to ‘boot up’ quickly my first thought was, “But what if the system is changed before the next boot – e.g., by modifying its Registry or even just some random system file that got trashed to correct some problem that couldn’t easily be corrected in the running system? Is the restart sequence smart enough to detect this and recover such that no internal inconsistencies will result?”
It turns out, though, that even simpler problems can occur, as happened when I booted up my Win8 Pro test system and found that it hadn’t recognized mouse or keyboard – because during its previous shut down they had been USB devices, while on the new boot-up they were plugged into the standard PS/2 ports (I had to plug the USB devices back in just to get the system shut down again). I haven’t checked to see whether other problems could occur if you had, e.g., plugged in (or removed) an eSATA drive while the system was ‘shut down’, but since I seem to remember cautions about doing that kind of thing even with USB drives during explicit hibernation on older laptops it might be worth knowing.
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/6320-fast-startup-turn-off-windows-8-a.html makes it clear that there are ways around this (and that Restart bypasses the partial hibernation facility, as I had discovered when noting that I had to perform a restart after booting up just to get to the boot menu that allows you to choose a different system to boot). Still, I expect that many users will be unpleasantly surprised at some point in their ‘Windows 8 experience’ to find that this snazzy new fast-boot facility has done something unexpected that they were never warned might occur when it was provided as their default behavior.
I’ve always assumed that the main contribution to boot time came from hard-disk accesses (that certainly seems to be one of the virtues touted for SSD boot drives, anyway) and that as processors became increasingly fast the processing-related delays had become negligible, in which case the existing on-disk file reorganization provided by the defragmenter since XP days should have obtained most of the attainable speed-up (making this new partial-hibernation wrinkle pretty much superfluous) – but being largely a Win2K hold-out (unlike the rest of my family) I’ve never actually tested this hypothesis and the existence of this new facility, mixed blessing as it is, tends to suggest otherwise. Perhaps Microsoft never got the defragmentation re-org working right (though it doesn’t seem as if that should have been all that difficult over the past decade-plus) and saw this as an easier way out.
Edit: Incidentally, the facility truly is dumb as the proverbial stone, since it does its quick-boot into Win8 Pro even when you’ve selected some other operating system in the Win8 Control Panel as the default to boot – you STILL have to Restart to get to that menu and boot the system you actually want (and said you wanted as the default choice).
Edit2: Just had occasion to plug in another SATA blu-ray drive and Win8 Pro failed to see it after boot – had to perform a restart before it became visible. Kind of ironic to support hot-plugging but not cold-plugging…
