Windows 8’s Hybrid Boot setting which is enabled by default offers faster booting when compared to Windows 7 traditional cold boot. Windows 8 shutdown is not a complete shutdown (read in detail below), to add or change hardware or for the complete shutdown we can disable Windows 8 Hybrid boot, here is how.
Difference between Windows 8 shutdown and Windows 7 traditional shutdown
For Windows 7 traditional shutdown: Windows closes all users sessions and services and devices in the kernel session and this is complete shutdown, where Windows 8 Shutdown is different where it closes user sessions and instead of closing kernel session windows hibernates it means Win8 saves system and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfile.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory.
Microsoft says
Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested)
Disabling Windows 8 hybrid Mode to get Windows 7 traditional shutdown
1. Open Control Panel> Hardware and Sound >Power options>click Require a password on wakeup” on the left-side of the screen
2. Click “ Change settings that are currently unavailable”
3. Now under Windows Shutdown settings uncheck for Enable Hybrid Boot (recommended) and click “Save Changes” button.
4. Close Power Options window and try to shutdown Windows 8.
Windows 7 classic Shutdown behavior option in Windows 8 allows for complete shutdown of windows and Windows 8 restart behavior will not be affected by this setting, unless otherwise needed you don’t need to enable this setting.
You need to enable Hybrid Boot feature once you disabled it by following the above steps.
