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What's the difference between a "warm boot" and a "cold boot"

Wow. You must live in some place warm. Here in the American Midwest, you sure would know the difference. We store our boots near our fireplaces to get them nice and toasty warm. Hence, these are called "warm boots". But, after you've been tromping around the 24 inches of snow we currently have to tromp through, and the minus 38 (F) wind chills we endure daily, those warm boots don't stay warm long. They become "cold boots" quick! And the only way to fix cold boots is to cease tromping around outside and come in, take off your boots, put them near the fireplace - and while you're waiting for your boots to warm up, go pour yourself a brandy and take a hot shower. After you get out of the shower, leave your boots by the fireplace, and pour another brandy - and don't go back outside! It's COLD out there!

OK enough entertainment, folks. On with the business at hand:

What is the difference between a warm boot and a cold boot?

The main difference between a warm boot and a cold boot is a warm boot (click Start, Restart) is more of a reset, and cold boot (click Start, Turn Off) means you are turning your computer completely off, letting it set for at least 60 seconds, then turning it back on. Generally, if you suspect any kind of hardware or device driver problem, you would need to cold boot; for software issues, a warm boot will usually suffice. Both will shut down all running programs. Both will clear your memory cache.

With a cold boot, leaving the power off for sixty seconds ensures that all capacitors on the motherboard are able to discharge by letting the motherboard power down completely- this also gives the hard disk(s) time to stop spinning. With a warm boot, power to the motherboard is generally not discontinued, capacitors are not discharged and hard drives do not normally completely spin down.

Unless you're a masochist, you're probably going to opt for the warm boot most of the time. A cold boot is more thorough and more complete. Most of the time a warm boot will be enough to flush the memory cache and correct whatever problem caused you to reboot in the first place. If it doesn't, the next thing you should try -before anything else is a cold boot.

You would certainly want to choose a warm boot whenever a Windows update or software installation requires you to restart your computer.

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