Meh, meh, and more meh

I've been writing this blog for what, 12 years now? Anyone that's followed it knows that I continue to mistrust Microsoft's marketing departments (Cisco's, Oracle's, and Red Hat's too), but that's a hazard from past employment (in part, validating vendor claims).

Anyone remember being told how amazing Windows 8 was, that it booted faster than any other version before it (and faster than OS X or Linux)? It's probably old news to most but today, I found out why.

While figuring out how to reset local admin credentials, the tool I was using kept indicating that the target partition hadn't gone through a full shutdown. This was a head-scratcher because I'd logged out and then selected shutdown.

While it's probably not actually news to anyone other than me, it turns out:

•  "sleep" == pause, 
• "shutdown" == hibernate, and 
•  "reboot" == full shutdown plus restart

The really bad news is that of the three options, none involve actually turning power off. Although "shutdown" consumes the least amount of power, it's still sipping at the battery.

So, for those of you that can't clear a password with an external tool: when the tool complains about the target partition not having been through a full shutdown, the above is "why".  Just select "reboot" instead and then interrupt the machine before it starts loading from the hard drive.