Ok, they are talking about fast startup, a feature that any sane admin disabled as soon as they could

Wait, before Windows 7, there were 4 shutdown options, shutdown, restart, hibernate, sleep.

Nobody used hibernation, so did they get rid of shutdown and replace it with the function of hibernate?

Nobody used hibernation? I beg to differ. I know plenty of people who use it. I just about never use the shutdown function, at least not on my daily driver. Closing a whole bunch of windows I still need and then opening them up after shutting down is a waste of time IMO. I much prefer to just continue where I left off. Also helps me get back into what I was doing earlier much better.

The options never changed, the difference is what the shutdown option does. Starting with Windows 8 AFAIK, shutdown only logs you off and then hibernates. The result is it looks like it has shut down, but starts up faster, since the kernel only has to be restored and not fully started. And honestly, when I read the article, the vast majority of problems they list are not problems stemming from the hybrid shutdown function, but from somewhere else, with hybrid shutdown just exacerbating the problem.

I thought Sleep maintained your session.

the difference between sleep and hibernation is where your session is stored, RAM vs. HDD/SSD

It's about the hybrid sleep option MS added, which I think gets enabled by default.

Disable hybrid sleep, and shutdown actually shuts down.

It's dumb, and surely caused more support issues for MS.

And sleep doesn't fully power down but maintains power to ram to keep that session alive.

Hibernate writes an image of ram to the hard drive, then powers down completely.

With sleep it continues to use a little power, and will eventually have to hibernate when battery gets low. 1

Fast Startup/Hybrid Sleep

Yea, it's a known problem maker that solves no problem that I know of.

Sleep and Hibernate worked fine - I never found a use-case for hybrid sleep.

But the average user would have no idea of the implications.

No, not really. Hibernate saves the entire system state to disk and then powers off. Fast Startup (the default shutdown behavior for the last decade) logs you off and saves the kernel and driver state to disk before powering off, hence it sometimes being called "hybrid boot".

I don't care about hibernate, sleep, or fast startup. The main issue I experience is that when I click shutdown the computer does not ever go into a sleep/off state. It looks like it's trying to shutdown, but ends up staying at the lock screen and I have to hold the power button down to kill the power. It's been a fairly consistent issue I've had across three machines over at least 6 years. I only have the issue on my work machine now because I addressed it on my machines by installing Linux.

This is going to sound really stupid, but does it happen with a different monitor plugged in? Happened to me.

There are some AWFUL drivers out there....

Who’s this nobody? I used hibernation extensively. It’s the one way I knew that I could put it in my backpack and not have it suddenly try to turn back on because of a random process or function that could resume from sleep and cook itself in my bag, and it also allowed me to save the battery for the same reason.

I used hibernate nearly every day in mid 00s. Then when one of my hard drives fried from what look like hibernate I never went back to it.

It seemed useful in the days of taking 5-10 minutes to start a PC but nowadays it's up in less than 1.

AFAIK the use case is laptops because sleep and hibernate still uses some small amount of the battery. You used to be able to stop that by turning off wake from USB but that meant having to press the power button to wake it up and I guess they decided to just make it that way anyway.

The only time I would disable hibernation is if I was running out of disk space.

Can you still disable that on current versions of the OS? I'm not really up to date on Windows. But I remember that it caused no end of trouble when I dual booted it semi-regularly, so I removed it all the time (it had a habit of turning itself back on for some reason).
Nowadays it seems that you have access to fewer options. I should boot a copy of Windows to see what it looks like, it's been a while.

Yeah, it can be disabled in Windows 11

People on laptops probably used it. I never used Windows on laptops much, only rarely on a desktop for games, so I didn't use it, but I could see the point of it.

This reminds me of an issue I had on a desktop I built in 2014. It would not stay off. However you turned it off, including holding the power button, it would start back up after 5-10 minutes. The only fix was to unplug the computer.

This is why I don't do lights on cases anymore.

Sleep does, hibernate is 100% off with no battery usage.

Thanks, always good to know.

If and only if you disable wake from USB.

I don’t even want to sleep my Mac. Decades of ghosts in the machine that ended up being something not properly shut off has taught me to either leave my computer running at idle or turning it O F F off and letting the RAM go cold.

I always turn off my computer every night, I can't stand the very slight fan noise of the computer.

Yeah. Both with external monitors and with just the laptop unplugged.

Hibernate is that thing where my wife's computer takes a full minute to wake up...

I don't know if that's a thing on newer Macs, but on older ones I'd just hit SMC reset to kill them quickly. Of course there was a period in my life where I touched 15 Macs a day.