If you’re a Windows 8 user, you may be wondering how to shutdown your computer in a secure way. Here are some tips to help you do so:

  1. Open the Start screen and type shutdown.exe.
  2. When the Shutdown screen appears, click on the blue “Shutdown now” button.
  3. The computer will shut down in a few minutes and will beep when it’s done.

Windows 8 comes with a new Hybrid Boot feature, which decreases boot times. But from time to time you may find you need to do a classic, full shutdown. Here’s how to do just that without disabling Hybrid Boot.

What is Hybrid Boot?

Hybrid Boot is a new feature in Windows 8 that takes the Hibernate feature we all know and love and improves upon it to bring us faster boot times. In your PC you have multiple sessions, more specifically you have session 0 which is reserved for the kernel session and session 1 which is normally your user session. In traditional implementations of hibernation when you click hibernate your PC takes everything that it currently has in memory (RAM) and writes it to the hiberfil.sys file on your hard drive, this includes both session 0 and session 1 data.

With Hybrid Boot, instead of hibernating both sessions it only hibernates session 0, it then closes your user session.  So now when you start your PC back up, it reads session 0 from hiberfil.sys and puts it back into memory, and starts a new user session for you. The result is dramatically faster boot times, with no effect on our user sessions.

How to Quickly Do a Full Shutdown

Right click on your Desktop and create a new shortcut.

When you are asked what you would like to create a shortcut to, type the following:

Then give your shortcut a name.

Once you have created your shortcut, right click on it and head into its properties.

Now click on the Change Icon button.

I will just be using one of the default icons that comes with Windows, but feel free to choose your own.

Finally you can pin the shortcut to the Start Screen for easy access.

To do a full shutdown all you need to do is click on the shortcut.

That’s all there is to it.