Back in the 1990s, my fellow PC chums and I thought we had stumbled across a magic trick with Windows 95, something that we thought nobody else knew about: holding the shift key when you hit restart ...

Shift+Restart in Windows 95 triggers a fast restart that skips a full reboot. win.com used a restart flag, shut down kernels, dropped to real mode, then relaunched protected mode. If win.com's ...

One of Microsoft's veteran software engineers explains the full 'secret sauce'. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.