When you click “Shut Down” on your Windows 10 PC, Windows doesn’t fully shut down. It hibernates the kernel, saving its state so it can boot faster. If you’re experiencing computer problems and need to reset that state, you’ll need to restart your PC instead.

1. Open Windows Settings On My Pc
2. Windows 10 Settings Flashes And Disappears
3. Windows 10 Settings Not Opening

May 15, 2019 - Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system offers a lot of compelling features. However, some of its default settings don't provide you with the best. Or 8 to Windows 10, the installation program keeps a copy of your previous.

Open Windows Settings On My Pc

We’ve personally experienced this problem ourselves. When faced with weird system problems that may be caused by a buggy driver or other low-level software issues, the problem persisted after shutting down our PC and booting it back up.

Why Doesn’t the “Shut Down” Option Fully Shut Down?

This weirdness is all thanks to Windows 10’s “Fast Startup” feature, which is enabled by default. This feature was introduced in Windows 8, and has also been called Fast Boot and Hybrid Boot or Hybrid Shutdown.

RELATED:The Pros and Cons of Windows 10’s “Fast Startup” Mode

In the traditional shutdown process, Windows fully shuts down everything, discards the running system state, and starts up from scratch the next time the PC boots. When you hibernate, Windows saves the entire system state, including all your open programs and files, to disk so you can quickly resume from where you left off.

Fast Startup mixes the traditional shutdown process with hibernation. With Fast Startup enabled, Windows 10 discards all your open programs and files (as it would during a traditional shutdown), but saves the state of the Windows kernel to disk (as it would during hibernation). The next time you boot your PC, Windows restores the kernel and starts up the rest of the system.

The kernel is the low-level core program at the heart of the operating system. It has full control over your computer and is one of the first things loaded during the boot process. The hardware drivers that your computer uses to interact with its hardware devices are part of the kernel. Loading a snapshot of the kernel speeds up the startup process, as Windows doesn’t have to take time to load all the device drivers and reinitialize your hardware devices.

This kernel hibernation process all happens automatically when you click “Shut Down,” and people will rarely notice the difference. But it means that if a hardware driver in your kernel is stuck in a weird state, shutting down your PC and then booting it back up again won’t fix the problem. Windows saves the current state and restores it instead of reinitializing everything.

How to Perform a Full Shut Down and Restart

If you’re troubleshooting system problems, you’ll want to perform a full shut down of the kernel to ensure Windows reinitializes things from scratch. To do this, just click the “Restart” option in the menu instead of the “Shut Down” option. Windows restarts your computer, but it performs a full shut down first and discards the state of the kernel while doing so.

RELATED:Why Does Rebooting a Computer Fix So Many Problems?

Microsoft made this decision because people experiencing problems often reboot their computers to fix them, so it makes some sense. On the other hand, it’s counterintuitive that the “Restart” option performs a more complete shut down than the “Shut Down” option. But that’s how it works!

You can also perform a full shut down by pressing and holding the Shift key on your keyboard while you click the “Shut Down” option in Windows. This works whether you’re clicking the option in the Start menu, on the sign-in screen, or on the screen that appears after you press Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

If you prefer, you can instead perform a full shutdown by using the shutdown command from a Command Prompt or PowerShell window. To do so, open a Command Prompt or PowerShell window—for example, by searching for “Command Prompt” in the Start menu and clicking its shortcut, or right-clicking the Start button and selecting “Windows PowerShell.” Type the following command, and then press Enter:

This command instructs Windows to shut down immediately and forcibly close any open applications. The shutdown command will always perform a full shutdown unless you add the /hybrid option. And if it’s something you want to keep handy, you can also make a shortcut that executes this command. All you have to do then is double-click the shortcut to perform a full shutdown.

If you never want to use the Fast Startup feature, you can disable it from the Control Panel. For example, some older hardware devices may not be compatible with Fast Startup and may not reinitialize themselves properly when you boot up again. Or you may be dual-booting Linux, and you won’t be able to access your Windows NTFS file system from within Linux if Windows performs a hybrid shutdown instead of a full shutdown.

To disable Fast Startup, head to Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options > Choose What the Power Button Does. Click the “Change settings that are currently unavailable” link at the top of the window, uncheck the “Turn On Fast Startup (Recommended)” option under Shutdown Settings, and then click the “Save Changes” button.

We don’t recommend you disable Fast Startup unless you have a good reason to do so. It helps your PC boot faster most of the time, and you can always perform a full shutdown with the tricks we discussed earlier. But, if you ever need to shut down and restart your PC to fix system problems, remember to either click “Restart” or hold Shift as you click “Shut Down” to perform a full shutdown.

Windows 10 Settings Flashes And Disappears

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While many people will balk and wish that Microsoft wasn’t slowly burying the trusted Control Panel, the Settings app has grown into a key feature of Windows 10. It’s the launchpad into controlling your system – from adding devices to controlling users and gaming features. If Settings stops working, Windows becomes pretty dysfunctional.

So if your Settings app is stalling or just not opening in the first place, here’s a bunch of fixes that should get it back to working order.

Related: Windows 10 Start Menu Search Not Working? Here are Some Fixes

A Simple Solution from Our Readers

Sometimes, the best solutions are those that seem too simple to be true. But in tech, that’s often the case, so kudos to our reader nico for leaving a comment with a solution that several other readers have reported back as working.

Here’s the fix:

1. Click the Start button, right-click the cog icon that would normally lead to the Settings apps, then click More and “App settings”.

2. Finally, scroll down in the new window until you see the Reset button, then click Reset.

Settings reset, job done (hopefully).

Alternative Ways to Open Settings

If you’re just looking for a quick workaround to a misbehaving Settings app, then your best bet could be to try and open it another way.

One method is to press Win + I to try and open the Settings app.

Alternatively, you can click the Action Center icon in the taskbar (the speech bubble at the bottom-right), and then click “All Settings.”

If these methods don’t work, or if your Settings app still can’t be accessed the normal way via your Start menu, then it’s time to try something a little more involved…

Reinstall and Re-Register Windows Apps

The Settings app in Windows 10 is counted among the official built-in Windows apps, so reinstalling it (along with every other Windows 10 app) should fix whatever problems you may have with it.

To do this, open the PowerShell (just type “powershell” into the Start menu Search, then right-click it and “Run as administrator”) and enter the following command:

That will re-register and reinstall all Windows apps, hopefully getting the Settings app (and others) back to full working order.

Run an SFC Scan

Before trying the more elaborate method of fixing the Settings app, here are a couple of quick fixes that might do the job:

• Scan your hard drive for errors – go to the Start menu, type cmd, open the command prompt, then type sfc /scannow
• That failing, you should try downloading the Windows Update Troubleshooter and see if that helps.

Create a New Windows User

Windows 10 Settings Not Opening

If you still can’t open the Settings app, then it’s time for the more radical solution of creating a new administrator account and transferring your files over to it. Seeing as you can’t use the Settings app to create a new account, you can instead use the Microsoft Common Console Document if you have Windows 10 Pro.

1. Click Start and type lusrmgr.msc. In the Common Console Document, click Users, right-click users, then “add new user.” Enter your info, then sign out of your current account and into your new one either through the Start menu or Ctrl + Alt + Del.

If you have Windows 10 Home Edition, then you’ll need to create a new user through the command prompt instead.

Click the Start menu, type cmd, right-click Command Prompt, and then click “Run as administrator.”

In the Command Prompt type the following command but with the username and password that you want to create for the new administrator account:

You should see the message “The command completed successfully” to inform you that the account has been created.

2. Next, go to “Control Panel -> User Accounts -> User Accounts -> Manage another account.”

3. Select the new account you just created, “Change the account type,” then click “Administrator” in the new window, followed by “Change Account Type.”

The new user is now the administrator.

4. Sign out of your current account and into the new user account. Try accessing the Settings app, and it should now be working.

The next step is to transfer your files from your old Windows account to your new one.

Go to the system hard drive (where Windows is installed) in File Explorer, click View in the tab at the top, then tick the “Hidden items” box.

Navigate to your old user account in File Explorer (C:/Users/old account name by default) and double-click it. You’ll see the following prompt.

Click Continue, enter your account password when prompted, then copy and paste all the files from that account to your new one (located at C:/Users/newusername by default).

You’ll see a message asking if you want to merge the folders from your old account to your new one. Click Yes.

Conclusion

It’s not simple, but creating a new Windows account is sadly the best workaround to this problem that’s managed to persist for some despite patches that have been released to tackle it. It’s worth stressing again that you should try the two simpler solutions at the start of this article before going through the hassle of creating a new account.

This article was first published in September 2016 and was updated in April 2019.

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