How to Shut Down Windows 8 (Full Shutdown and

Normal Hybrid Shutdown)

Turning off Windows 8: Hybrid Shutdown (Partial Hibernation) as well as Real Shutdown
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You are here: howtohaven.com (main page) >System "How To" Guides >How to Shut Down Windows 8 (Full
Shutdown and Normal Hybrid Shutdown)
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How to Shut Down Windows 8 (Full Shutdown and Normal Hybrid

Shutdown)

Windows 8 presents many problems for the user (both new and experienced). Among the first issues you will
encounter is the question of how to shut the computer down when you're through using it. There are however 2
aspects of this, both of which will be addressed in this article. The first is the simple question of how to turn off
your computer, since the user interface provides no clue on how you can do this. The second aspect is for the
advanced user who, may for various reasons, need Windows 8 to be fully shut down. The default shutdown
procedure for Windows 8 is commonly referred to as a "Hybrid Shutdown": it shares some characteristics with
both the "Hibernation" option and a complete power off, but is not identical to either.
I will address the basic user interface problem of how to turn off your computer first. If you already know that, and
are here simply to find out how to get Windows to do a real shutdown, skip to the next section.

How do I Turn Off a Windows 8 Computer?

1. Move your mouse pointer to the top right corner of your screen. If nothing happens, just keep moving the
mouse slowly in that region. There are no buttons, icons or any sort of hint that gives you a reason to
move your mouse there, but that's the place you need to go to start the multi-step procedure to powering
off your computer.
If you hit the magic spot, a narrow panel will slide into view on the right side of the screen. Go immediately
to the next step. If your reflexes are slow or you wait too long (either because you are trying to figure out
what the icons mean or have a physical disability), the panel will disappear, and you'll have to move your
mouse away and back again to reacquire this panel.
2. Click the "Settings" icon. This is the picture that looks like a gear at the bottom of the panel. Yes, I know it
doesn't make sense to have the shutdown facility hidden in the configuration settings. (It's comparable to
putting the front door of your house in the toilet.) But that's where it is, so there's no help for it.
3. A new side panel, called "Settings", will replace the previous panel. You will see, probably to your surprise,
that the "Power" icon is found here (at the bottom of the panel). Click it.
4. A submenu will appear. Click the "Shut down" item in that menu.
5. This will cause Windows to terminate your running programs, log you off the system, and seemingly shut
down the computer.
6. Warning: if you use a desktop computer or a laptop that doesn't have a charged battery, do not unplug the
main power when the screen goes dark. If your computer has hardware lights (or LEDs) on the casing that
show you that the hard disk is still active, or that the power supply is still being used, wait till all those lights
go out before unplugging anything. Be prepared to wait. It takes a while after the screen goes dark before
it is truly shut down.
As you may already have expected from developers who think it's a good idea to put the shutdown facility
in the configuration section, Windows 8 turns the screen off early to give you the illusion that it has shut
down quickly. Unfortunately, if you believe this illusion and act on it, you will corrupt your system, since it
will still be writing things to your hard disk.

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For computer users with low self-confidence: don't worry. Your inability to find a way to shut down Windows 8
(or do many other things with Windows 8 for that matter) is not because computers are too complex for you or
that you're not smart enough. The deficiency lies with Windows 8, not you. Even experienced users have
problems finding out how to do basic things in Windows 8.
Close

One of the tenets of designing a good user interface ("User Interface Design 101", if you will) is to try to make
things easy for users to find and use so that they don't need too much prior knowledge or have to memorize

anything. Modern software provide visual cues that let you figure out how you can get things done. Very often,
this is in the form of a menu, where you can get a list of tasks that describe what the program can do.
The shutdown facility in Windows 8 has no visual cue whatsoever leading up to it. There is neither icon, nor
button, nor prompt nor any hint that will cause you to think that moving your mouse to the upper right corner of
the screen will do anything. As such, unless you are suffering from a muscular dysfunction that makes you
jerk your mouse pointer wildly in uncontrollable random jerks across the screen, you will never discover this
mysterious panel (which, in a failure of vocabulary, is called the "Charms" panel, a name with no connection
to either its appearance or its function).
Not only is there no way for you to find the Settings icon under normal-use conditions, even if you finally do
find out about its existence, if you are a sane, logical person with a modicum of common sense, you will most
likely not suspect that the power switch is categorised ("categorized" in US English) as a customisation tool.
(It's like saying that the ability to turn on and off an electrical appliance is a customisation option for that
gadget.)
In other words, your difficulty in shutting down Windows 8 is not a reflection of your competence. You are just
not the target demographic for Windows 8, at least from the looks of things. Perhaps it's meant for people with
muscle control problems ("Oh look! In my last spastic jerk of the mouse, I discovered a new feature!") who
also suffer severe lapses in logic ("I know! The way to turn off the computer must be in the customisation
settings.").
Note: you can also shut down the computer by using the usual "Alt+F4" keyboard shortcut from the desktop.
However, Alt+F4 will not work from the Start screen, so you need to get rid of that first. (Alt+F4 means holding
down the Alt key on your keyboard while hitting F4.) If you don't understand this paragraph, and have never
heard of Alt+F4, just ignore it and use the method mentioned earlier. Modern systems (with the exception of
Windows 8) are designed so that the average (non-geek) person doesn't have to learn arcane things like this.
Another alternative to using the above cumbersome and unintuitive procedure is to install a third-party start
menu into Windows 8. These are software written by other frustrated users that mimic the old Windows start
menu. They have additional features like being able to boot directly to the desktop instead of the start screen,
giving you a button to shut down the computer from the menu, and a way to efficiently look for and run all your
installed programs. The start menus are free, and can be found on thefreecountry.com's Free Start Menus for
Windows 8 page at http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/start-menu-for-windows-8.shtml.

Situations Where You May Need to Do a Full (Genuine) Shutdown in Windows 8

If you are a novice Windows user, and have arrived at this website merely to find out how to turn off your
Windows 8 computer, you can skip the rest of this article. This section onwards is mainly intended for people
who either boot multiple operating systems on the same computer, or who need to run things like boot disks
to back up the computer or rescue disks to get rid of viruses and the like. In fact, if the previous sentence did
not make sense to you (eg, "what on earth is an operating system?"), chances are that the rest of this article
will be both irrelevant and incomprehensible to you.
When you shut down Windows 8 using the method suggested above, by default, you're not actually shutting it
down completely, the way you did in earlier versions of Windows. Even though the menu item is called "Shut
down", Windows actually does a partial hibernation, which is why the shutdown process takes so long. It does
this so that it can boot to Windows faster the next time you turn on the computer; that is, you trade a quick
shutdown for a fast startup.
For those who want a slightly more detailed description, the new "Shut down" option actually terminates all your
programs and logs you out of the system. Then it writes to the hard disk the contents of your system memory
(the RAM), which includes things like the core Windows system (called the "kernel"), the drivers and the services
(background system programs). The next time you turn your computer on, Windows merely loads what it
previously saved, and does minimal initialisation of the hardware, which is why the startup in Windows 8 is faster
than in previous Windows versions.
This shutdown method is known as a "hybrid shutdown". It is also referred to as "Fast Startup" in certain parts of
the Windows 8 user interface. It differs from the normal Hibernation in that the latter saves everything currently
running (including user programs, etc). The intention of the hybrid shutdown is to give the user some of the
benefits of a full shutdown (complete power off and some hardware reinitialisation) while still providing a quick
startup time.
Although this feature is useful for a large number of people (possibly even the majority), you may need to
override or even disable this feature under certain circumstances. Here are some instances that I can think of
where you may want to do this:

1. If you run multiple operating systems on the same computer, for example, you run Windows 8 in one
partition on your hard disk and dual-boot to Linux in another, and you access one or more shared drives or
partitions in both systems, you may want to completely disable this hybrid shutdown facility.
2. If you back up your computer from a boot CD, DVD or even USB flash drive, you may need to make sure
that Windows was not previously shut down using the hybrid shutdown method prior to booting your CD
(or DVD or thumb drive).
3. If you are planning to run an antivirus scan from a rescue disk, the system should probably not have been
shut down with the hybrid shutdown prior to booting your antivirus disk.
I qualified all the above statements with "may" and "probably" because I'm not really sure whether it's needed or
not. However, I personally feel that erring on the side of caution is prudent. The reason for this is that I'm not
sure whether Windows saves its in-memory representation of the hard disk file system structures in the
hibernation file when it enters its hybrid shutdown. If it does, and the other operating system modifies the same
hard disk, then Windows 8's understanding of the hard disk layout is going to be wrong when it resumes. For
example, if your other system saved a file called "howtohaven.com's URL" that previously wasn't there in
Windows 8 into a partition shared with Windows 8, and you resume Windows 8, the latter will think that the
portion of the disk currently occupied by that new file is still empty since its internal map of the hard disk, kept in
RAM, will not contain the changes made by the other system. This will lead to system corruption and lost data.
It's possible that things will be okay if you don't actually mount the same partitions in the different operating
systems that you load. And it's also possible that it will always be okay and that Windows has a mechanism to
detect that the disk was modified in the interim since it was last shutdown and will simply reload the disk
structures from the disk. However, since I'm not sure of any of these things, my preference is (if I were in this
boat) to do a real shutdown before any such potentially risky operation. In fact, when there are 2 or more
operating systems sharing a single computer, my policy is not to allow any of those operating systems to
hibernate or its equivalent (hybrid shutdown).
Anyway, it's your choice whether you want to do this. It is, after all, your computer and your data. I personally will
not want to take the risk, since I don't know whether Windows (or any other operating system for that matter)
was written to cope with this not-so-commonplace situation. But as implied above, I have no inside knowledge of
Windows 8, so I could be entirely wrong about the need to do it.
I should also mention that if you always start your other operating system (or boot disk) by rebooting from
Windows 8 instead of directly booting from a powered off state, you probably don't need to do a full shutdown of
Windows 8 beforehand. I'm given to understand that Windows 8 always does a full shutdown before rebooting. It
only does its hybrid shutdown when you're actually trying to power off the computer.

How to Really Shut Down Windows 8 (and Not Hybrid Shutdown or Hibernation)
Whether or not you agree with my list of possible scenarios where you might want to do a full shutdown of
Windows 8, the following are several ways in which you can accomplish this should you need to.
Using the command line

Start up the command prompt. You can do this from the start screen by simply typing "cmd" (without the
quotes) and hitting the ENTER key.
Type "shutdown /s /t 0" (without the quotes) in the window that appears, followed by the ENTER key.
The first word "shutdown" invokes the command line program that does the job of shutting down or
rebooting the computer. The parameter "/s" that follows tells the program that it is to shut down (as
opposed to rebooting, which uses "/r"). The "/t 0" option tells the program that it is to start work
immediately (ie, in 0 seconds).

Note that you can see a list of options that "shutdown" supports by typing "shutdown /?" instead of the
command line I gave above. You will notice, if you do, that it also supports a hybrid shutdown, using the
option "/hybrid".

Using a shortcut on the desktop

If you find that you often need to do a full shutdown, and don't fancy using the command line every single
time, create a shortcut on your desktop to do the job.
To do this, right click the desktop, followed by "New" in the menu that appears. Then click "Shortcut" in the
submenu that appears after that. In the dialog box entitled "Create Shortcut" that appears, type
"shutdown /s /t 0" (without the quotes). Click the "Next" button. In the next screen, type whatever you
like. If you don't know what to name the shortcut, type "Full Shutdown" (without the quotes). Then click the
"Finish" button.
Now when you doubleclick that shortcut on your desktop, your system will do a complete shutdown.

 Completely Disabling Hybrid Shutdown (or Fast Startup)

Another way is to disable hybrid shutdown altogether. That way, every shutdown you perform using the
Power icon in the Settings menu will be a full, traditional shutdown.
To do this, call up the Power Options program. Unfortunately, you can't simply type "power options" in the
Start screen the way you used to do in Windows 7 and Vista. The search facility in the Windows 8 start
screen is crippled and not very user friendly (so what else is new?), requiring additional intervention and
some prior knowledge of where things are located. Instead, start by typing "power" (without the quotes) in
the start screen. This will bring up the Search panel on the right side of the screen. Use your mouse to
click the line that says "Settings" in that panel. On the left, you should be able to spot the "Power Options"
line. Click it. (If you are familiar with the Windows+X keyboard shortcut, you can also use it to bring up a
menu from which "Power Options" can be accessed. Like I said, you need a fair amount of prior
knowledge before you can use Windows 8.)
The Power Options window will appear. Click the line "Choose what the power buttons do" on the left side
of the screen. This will cause the System Settings window to appear. Click the line "Change settings that
are currently unavailable" somewhere under the top paragraph of that window.
When you do that, some new options will appear below. If your screen is small, you may not be able to
see everything. If so, scroll down (eg by using the scroll bar on the right).
In the section with the heading "Shutdown settings", you should be able to see 4 items. Click the box for
"Turn on fast startup (recommended)" to uncheck it.
Click the "Save changes" button found at the bottom of the window. This will return you to the Power
Options window. Now click the "X" (close button) on the top right corner of the window to exit this program.
From now on, every time you click "Shut down" from the settings panel, Windows 8 will do a genuine
shutdown.
Copyright 2013-2014 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved. Get more "How To" guides and tutorials from
http://www.howtohaven.com/.
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