By Richard Speed
Publication Date: 2026-01-20 12:08:00
Microsoft’s Raymond Chen has explained why holding down Shift during a Windows 95 restart would get the system up and running again far faster than a full reboot.
Some old hands will nod sagely over the “Shift during Restart” trick, while others will wish they’d known about it three decades ago, given how often Windows 95 needed coaxing back to life.
Chen explained that the EW_RESTARTWINDOWS flag was passed to the old 16-bit ExitWindows function. The 16-bit Windows kernel shut down, then the 32-bit virtual memory manager shut down, before the CPU finally dropped back into real mode, and handed control to win.com.
For the uninitiated, real mode is how x86-compatible CPUs start – it’s a legacy mode with direct hardware access that’s now just a stepping stone to protected mode, which modern operating systems use. When win.com (running in real mode) received control, the CPU would signal it to start…
