How to: control Fast Startup setting via registry

If you navigate to Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Power Options > System Settings you can find GUI option to disable/enable so called Fast Startup option (formerly known as Fast Boot):

This is sort of light-weight/hybrid hibernation mode – with this option enabled on shut down system log offs all users and closes programs yet leaves Windows kernel loaded and system session running, next it notifies drivers (those which have support for this) to prepare for hibernation and saves this system state into hibernation file. This allows for faster boot by means of loading this state into RAM on startup (you can read up more on this here).

Anyhow I just wanted to take a note of corresponding registry key which enables/disables this setting – this is registry key named HiberbootEnabled which can be found under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power.

This is especially important as there is no GPO to control this feature, so you can use some scripting to control/verify state of this setting via registry key.

And in case you need to check for supported sleep states on your system (including Fast Startup) you can leverage  powercfg /a command.

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