Essentially in Windows 8 (out of the box) if you hit "Shutdown" then it logs the user out and then "hibernates" the kernel, the registry, services, drivers, and all other "system" level processes.
The computer is then ordered to power off (just like hibernate). When you turn the machine back on, a notice appears on the screen which reads "Resuming from Hibernation" and it loads the Hibernation file into active memory.
Fast Startup is essentially Hibernation without a logged in user.
Windows 8's boot times with Fast Startup enabled is very competitive to Windows 7's boot times using Hibernation (instead of "Shutdown"). It is also very comparable too as Windows 8 doesn't truly shutdown in the traditional sense.
If you boot Windows 8 without Fast Startup enabled then the boot times are very similar to Windows 7's boot times.
As I said, Windows 8 lies to you. It isn't faster, it is just pushing Hibernation in a new deceptive way in order to appear faster.
Citation needed.
I point out how this argument makes no sense.
I don't think I'm the one you should target with "citation needed".
Source: Microsoft, "Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8", Building Windows 8 blog, September 9, 2011 [1]
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/08/delivering-fas...
Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7
Note the part that where he claims that you can get the same speedup on Windows 7 by enabling hibernation. This is provenly false and anyone who has tried it would know.
I have tried it. I do know. In fact if you measure it "to desktop" then Windows 7 full hibernation beats Windows 8's fast startup, because Windows 7 caches user programs in additional to Microsoft's side (i.e. registry, services, kernel, etc).
Primarily because I have SQL Server on it for development - the services have a extremely long shutdown and startup time, which doesn't need to happen for hibernation.
PS C:\> (Measure-Command { Start-Service MSSQLSERVER }).TotalMilliseconds
1127.5208
As for shutdown, while it depends on how you're using it immediately beforehand, I've never seen it take more than a few seconds on a development box.
Incorrect. This is provenly false. Windows 8 boots faster from a cold boot than Windows 7. It really does. The memory footprint is much smaller. The runtime environment is much more optimized and snappy.
You can tell Microsoft has cut out lots of cruft and optimized critical code-paths, especially with regard to boot.
Hibernation which you refer to is a different feature, and provides you with the same session and programs and state as you had running before, just like a normal sleep would do on a laptop, except it will survive a flat battery. It does so by persisting your entire RAM to disk for reloading on boot. This is completely different from booting which would give you a new, empty session.
So if you end up with an empty session, it's provenly not hibernating, it's booting. And boot is much, much faster.
On all system's I've had, hibarnation, designed to save time, has only caused increased latency for shutdown/sleeping/hibernation, and similar increase in boot times since not only Windows needs to load, but all that persisted state must be restored as well.
On machines with more than 4GBs of RAM this leads to horrible performance and I've permanently disabled the option for the OS to use this due to the performance issues involved.
On Windows 8 I've kept the defaults and things are just flying.