Here is the strange pattern: shut the PC down at night, switch it on in the morning — black screen. Restart it — everything perfect. That split behaviour is the fingerprint of Fast Startup, and the fix takes two minutes once you know where it hides.
Fast Startup is a hybrid between shutdown and hibernation. When you shut down with it enabled, Windows saves the core system state to disk and reloads it next time instead of starting cleanly. If that saved state contains a half-broken driver state, you get it back faithfully every morning — often as a black screen where the desktop should be. A restart, by contrast, always performs a complete fresh start, which is why restarting magically works. The video above covers Fast Startup's cousin problems too: once you spot the shutdown-versus-restart split, you have already made the diagnosis.
Shutdown broken but restart perfect is the classic Fast Startup signature — shutdown is not doing what you think.
Fast Startup depends on hibernation being available. Turning hibernation off removes both at once — useful on desktops that never hibernate anyway.
powercfg /h offpowercfg /h onFast Startup can run harmlessly for a year and then turn on you. The usual trigger is a driver or Windows update that leaves the saved state slightly wrong: the shutdown saves the bad state, and every cold start faithfully reloads it. That is also why the advice to just restart it seems to fix display and network faults that keep coming back after shutdown — the restart was the real repair, because it skipped the saved state entirely.
On a modern SSD, Fast Startup saves only a few seconds, which is why technicians disable it without hesitation on any machine showing this pattern. On an old mechanical hard disk the cold boot becomes noticeably slower — that is the real trade. If the black screen disappears with Fast Startup off, keep it off: a boot that works beats a boot that is ten seconds faster and sometimes black.
Every black screen pattern — before login, after login, driver-caused and update-caused — diagnosed the professional way in the full video.
▶️ Watch Full VideoBecause with Fast Startup enabled, shutdown is not a full close — Windows hibernates the system kernel and reloads that saved state at power-on. A restart always discards the saved state and loads everything fresh, so a fault stored in the saved state never appears on restarts.
Slightly, on paper. On an SSD the difference is a few seconds; on a mechanical hard disk it can be more noticeable. Most people accept the small cost in exchange for a cold start that works every time.
That means hibernation is disabled, which also disables Fast Startup — so Fast Startup cannot be your cause. Run powercfg /h on as an administrator if you want the option back, or look at the driver and shell causes instead.