Uptime and Windows 8

[jsmorley]

If you use the Uptime measure in Rainmeter to display how long since your last system shutdown / restart, you should be aware that a change in Windows 8 can make a difference in how it works.

With Windows 8, the standard "shut down" functionality now does a "hybrid shut down", in order to make the system start MUCH faster when you start it up again. What this does is "hibernate" the system / kernel part of Windows, and shut down the "user" part. That way when you restart, Windows gets through the underlying boot up of the system in a hot hearbeat, and then loads your profile and apps normally.

The only issue is that Windows (and thus Uptime) does not see this as a full shutdown of your system. So the system uptime value will not be reset to zero. Depending on what you want, this may be good or bad...

If you want more control over this, you can create two shortcuts, and use the one you want depending on whether you wish a "full" shut down, or the normal "hybrid" one.

Normal / Hybrid Shut Down:
%windir%\System32\shutdown.exe /s /hybrid /f /t 00

Full Shut Down:
%windir%\System32\shutdown.exe /s /f /t 00

You can create these shortcuts, and put them on your desktop or pin them to your Windows 8 Start screen.

Note: "Restart" always does a full system restart and is not effected.