The trick behind the faster restart in Windows 95 was that it did not fully reboot the PC.
When you held Shift while restarting, Windows passed a special flag to the old 16-bit ExitWindows function.
Instead of powering everything down, Windows shut down the 16-bit kernel, then the 32-bit virtual memory manager, and switched the CPU back to real mode. Control was handed back to win dot com with a signal that basically said, “Start Windows again.”
win dot co, then tried to rebuild Windows in memory without resetting the hardware. If the memory layout was still clean and unfragmented, Windows restarted quickly. If not, it gave up and did a full reboot.
That shortcut was the real secret sauce.
Abhijith M B
Mayank Parmar
