Microsoft Veteran Explains Shift Restart Windows 95 Trick

Windows 95 had a secret restart trick most people never knew

Raymond Chen recently shared another interesting tidbit about the inner workings of Windows 95. The original 32-bit consumer operating system had a "secret" fast-restart feature, which users could activate by holding the Shift key while restarting through the OS GUI. If everything worked as intended, the system would restore a...Read Entire Article

Microsoft veteran explains Shift restart Windows 95 trick

: Hold down Shift to make the magic happen (or not, as the case might be)

What was the secret sauce that allows for a faster restart of Windows 95 if you hold the shift key? – OSnews

I totally forgot you could do this, but back in the Windows 9x days, you could hold down shift while clicking restart, and it would perform a sort-of “soft” restart without going through a complete reboot cycle. What’s going on here? The behavior you’re seeing is the result of passing the EW_RESTART­WINDOWS flag to the old 16-bit Exit­Windows function. What happens is that the 16-bit Windows kernel shuts down, and then the 32-bit virtual memory…

The shift key trick to quickly restart Windows 95 wasn't a placebo, it was a neat little system to avoid a full PC reboot

One of Microsoft's veteran software engineers explains the full 'secret sauce'.