Have you ever seen the Windows login screen on your monitor and thought, “Wait a minute, didn’t I tell it to shut down?”
For a while I doubted myself: maybe I had asked Windows to “update and restart” instead of “update and shutdown”. And maybe I should go check the stove burners, because I clearly can’t be trusted with the on/off states.
But no, it’s was not Me. When I mentioned this experience at a meeting recently, another PC Gamer editor said: Wait a minute, you too?
Windows has been doing this since at least 2021, when someone asked what was happening with restarting their PC instead of shutting down after updates on the official Windows forum. Then, about eight months ago, a dozen people reported the issue in a Reddit thread. That’s about when it started happening for me.
Some say this happens every time Windows has to restart multiple times to apply an update, but I’m not sure: it seems to only restart once when I tell it to update. update and shut down or update and restart. In this 2021 thread someone said it was a BIOS issue, so you could try updating your motherboard firmware, but I also can’t tell if that’s definitely the problem.
Ironically, go far enough back in Google search results and you’ll find someone complaining that the update and shutdown feature does what it claims to do. Rather than rebooting to complete the update, it would leave the PC powered off and complete the update on the next startup.
That’s fair enough, it’s also not ideal. The best version of the system would reboot as many times as needed, then “remember” to shut down as requested. This seems to be how it’s supposed to work in Windows 11. But that’s not the case.
I can’t find any official comments from Microsoft Support on this, but if it’s my fault for being lazy about motherboard maintenance, I’ll refrain from ranting about Windows 11 bugs here.
Mostly, I just wanted to let people who have experienced this know that they haven’t lost control of reality. You locked your car. You turned off the oven. And you clicked “update and shut down”.
