How to Restart a Windows Computer (5 Ways)

Jul. 8, 2024

Restarting a Windows PC is as simple as it gets, but someone who has switched from a different operating system might not know how to do it. Or perhaps users are looking for different ways to do it than usual. Whatever might be the case, restarting Windows is one of the fundamental things that you’ll see yourself doing often, so here are all the possible ways to restart a Windows PC.

Method 1: From the Start Menu

The standard and most common way of restarting Windows is using the power options in the Start Menu. Make sure you save your work before restarting. Here’s how to do it.

Another popular way to restart a Windows PC is by using a keyboard shortcut. Here’s how to do it:

Windows has many power user commands that launch or activate different operating system functions and features. One of them is the shutdown command which, as the name suggests, can shutdown, restart, send the computer to sleep, and carry out many more functions. Here’s how to use the shutdown command to restart your Windows PC.

There are times when Windows freezes and acts unresponsive. In that case, users cannot access the power menu or the Terminal to restart their Windows PC. The only option is to wait or force restart your PC. Here’s how it’s done.

Simplifying the steps to get to the restart option on Windows can save you a lot of time. You can do so by creating a shortcut on your desktop and double-clicking on it each time you want to restart. Here’s how to create a restart shortcut on Windows.

You could useidentifier -tto schedule the restart like in Method 3 and add “00” to it to instantly restart Windows. The OS defaults to scheduling the restart after 30 seconds after the command is executed so that you can save all your work until then.

So these were the five methods to restart Windows. There’s another way that involves Windows Task Scheduler, where you can schedule the restart days prior or make it a repetitive task. However, we will dwell deeper into the same in one of our future guides. Let us know your thoughts about Windows in the comments.