Do not skip the latest B8 boot post
Hey all, Ned here. The Building Windows 8 blog recently posted a new article from Chris Clark that you might have passed over due to the title, which sounds like another article on boot performance:
Don’t skip it! A more descriptive title would have been “The F8 and F2 boot menus are gone on Windows 8 and you need to read this post to do your job, IT Pro. ”
Windows 8 is designed to run on hardware that boots too fast for a human to react through a keyboard, requiring new methods to get to a boot menu. Note down what the article describes so that when you need to troubleshoot a slow logon or slow boot, you can get into Safe Mode and other diagnostic states (PC Settings, shift+restart, shutdown.exe /o /r, msconfig.exe). All of these apply to Windows 8 Developer Preview and Windows Server “8” Beta, which you can get your hot little hands on right now.
It is also important to note – and not mentioned in the article – that on Windows Server 2012 only, you can still use F8. The new boot menu system eventually gets you back to the familiar menu with your favorite DSRM option too, so don’t feel like we’re making you relearn everything:
Also not mentioned but preemptively answered now: while shutdown /o was updated to support the new boot menus, the restart-computer Windows PowerShell cmdlet was not.
- Ned “Doc Martens” Pyle
Comments
Anonymous
May 23, 2012
So, what do we tell the Financial Director when he asks how to turn off his machine? "shutdown /s /t 00" might not appeal. Just a thought.Anonymous
May 23, 2012
I'd tell him to press the power button or close the lid. Worst case, I'd tell him to mouse the charm bar and click Power. Why does he need to use shutdown.exe in your scenario?Anonymous
May 23, 2012
Yeah I did not get from this article that it was no longer possible to shut down your PC in Win8. In fact the article was about the exact opposite of shutting down. shrug This is not counting servers, but as far as my personal PC is concerned, I can't even remember the last time I needed to boot in to safe mode.Anonymous
May 24, 2012
In some respects it is pretty hard to shut down your computer nowadays - that charms bar + power thing will definitely take some getting used to (it did for me, but then I started hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL and choosing power form there to save one click). It's also a good point that reaching an actual S5 power state of truly shutdown is harder in Win8 as well, at least by default - there is a lot of magic under the hood to make your boot up faster that often means not truly turned off (see blogs.msdn.com/.../delivering-fast-boot-times-in-windows-8.aspx , blogs.msdn.com/.../reengineering-the-windows-boot-experience.aspx , and blogs.msdn.com/.../building-a-power-smart-general-purpose-windows.aspx ). I find myself needing to get to the boot menu more often than I'd like on client :-(