Restart Vista or XP without restarting the PC trick fails
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Before I go on with this, I tried it on three computers, two with Vista and one with XP, it did not work for one reason or another. But here it is for those that would like to try.
An article over on CodeJacked suggests that you can reboot Windows without having the computer cycle all the way back to the BIOS and do a complete reboot. The alleged trick is to press Shift while selecting the Restart option in either XP or Vista. Results are nonexistent for most and the PC usually turns off and reboots normally.
Some manufacturers require the computer to cycle back to the BIOS in order to restart itself, in one instance, a computer couldn’t locate the hard drive which required powering it off and back on again. Most of the incidents were that it simply didn’t work and the computer cycled all the way back to the BIOS any way.
There’s also another fault in the article that claims “A modern PC with Vista Home Edition takes about one and a half minutes to boot.” Not in my experience and not with XP. In either case, my Vista PC cold boots in about 30 seconds, from BIOS to Vista in 30 seconds, the same holds true for a two(ish) year old computer running XP.
Other than the fact that this operation failed on the three computers I tried it on, it seems there is no “magical” way to reboot your PC without it going back to the BIOS. Feel free to try it, though, but it just seems like this article could be a fake.
It appears that the reason this doesn’t work on anything beyond Windows 98 (it does work on Windows 95/98/ME) is because every version of Windows since 2000 is not based on DOS, this trick used to restart Windows without dropping back to the DOS prompt and since Windows 2K, XP and Vista lack DOS then it won’t work.
I’d have to agree with the commenters on this one, the story is inaccurate and should be buried six feet under (maybe nine for good measure) and never spoken of again.
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