Manage Windows 10 Fast Startup with SCCM Compliance Baseline

What is Windows 10 fast startup

Fast Startup in Windows 10 is supposed to help boot Windows up much faster. In a complete shutdown scenario, Windows logs off all users and closes all applications. Fast start up is similar to a complete shutdown but with a mix of hibernation. In Fast Startup Windows logs off all users and shuts down all applications at this point Windows is at a stage similar to first boot but Windows then hibernates the windows kernel and loaded drivers to “help” reduce the startup time.

Why you should consider disabling it

In our environment we have found that on machines with many profiles Fast Startup actually slows things down and can use a lot of disk space. Most of our teaching machines have SSD’s and space is limited. Its worth pointing out that this can also cause problems with

• Windows Updates – many updates need a restart and if you have shutdown the machines rather than restarted it can cause them to fail to install.
• Dual boot systems – On shutdown it locks the hard disk, so only a reboot works.
• Encrypted drives – I have found on laptops that are installing updates that need a restart this has caused Bitlocker to ask for the recovery key.

Automating the management with SCCM CB

It looks like Windows 10 Fast Startup mode seems to help some machines and disabling it across the enterprise seems over kill, from what my colleagues have said and my own experience staff machines with limited number of users (and large hard disks) seem to benefit from this. I am sure if you are a fan of the site you may have realized by now that Maurice Daly and I are big fans of Configuration Items and Configuration baselines.

Configuration Item

1. Open the SCCM Console and expand the Compliance Settings section
2. Right click on the Configuration Item and select Create Configuration Item
3. Give your CI a name, always good to follow a naming pattern.
4. Select Windows 10 only.
5. This a registry setting so we can actually browse to the setting we want to change(clearly do this on a Windows 10 machine)
6. Browse to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentContorlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power and look for “HiberBootEnabled”
   • It will currently be set to 1 (enabled) this is turned on by default on Windows 10
   • Tick “This registry value must satisfy the following rule if present”
   • We want to enforce the value of 0 on it (disabled)
7. So thats the setting and compliance rules set, time to review.
8. Under “HiberbootEnabled Equals 0” make sure you tick “Remediate noncompliant rules when supported”.
9. Under Compliance Rules make sure remediate is ticked.

Configuration Baseline

With the Configuration Item created the next step is to create a Configuration Baseline and deploy it to your collection. My collections contains all Windows 10 teaching machines.

1. Right click on Configuration Baseline and click Create Configuration Baseline.
2. Give the baseline a name.
3. The final step is to deploy the Configuration Baseline to the Collection, so right click on the Configuration Baseline and Deploy. Ensure that “Remediate noncompliant rules when supported” is ticked.

Monitoring

Under the monitoring node I can see compliant machines.