- Apr 26, 2004
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I was not aware this was a thing and I think I have fallen victim to it twice now. Apparently by default the shutdown button does not shutdown the computer and somehow suspends it. This mean your up time slowly creeps up over time unless you issue a restart. If you have any kind of driver with a memory leak and it entirely fill up. This happened to me 2 months ago and even doing a reset, but keep data option would not resolve the issue and I had to format the OS drive to restore the system to working. Yesterday I noticed it was getting more and more sluggish and I see in task manager all 32 GB of ram are mostly used fluctuating from 97% to 99% usage despite having closed all applications and no processing showing significant usage. I foolishly shutdown the PC twice and powered it on trying to fix it but each time it came back on it was in the same bad state. Finally after a 3rd power cycle it went to 55% or so usage so I gave up and did yet another format and it started working normally. It took about an hour to load everything I had previously and some stuff is still not done. Only after I did that I did some research and found out about the fake shutdown. I highly recommend disabling this if you suspect you have having phantom RAM usage and system slow downs.
How to disable fast startup in Windows 11
How to disable fast startup in Windows 11