How To Check Your Windows 10 Last Boot Session

Unbeknownst to many users who utilize the Windows 10 operating system, It's able to perform a number of shutdown and startup operations- all based on how you decide to power down your PC, and launch the OS thereafter. Sometimes, It's Important to Identify exactly how your computer was last booted down & powered up, hence In this tutorial, I will show you how to check your Windows 10 last boot session.


Windows 10 has three native startup & shutdown options as follows.

• Fast Startup:

This Is enabled by default, which (as It's name Implies), allows your computer to startup a lot faster after being shutdown. It's also referenced as Hybrid Shutdown and Hybrid Boot.

• Hibernate:

As opposed to Sleep mode that saves everything In Memory (Ram), Hibernate saves your applications, files etc onto the hard disk. As such, It's designed to use less power than Sleep mode and when you turn on your PC, It will resume where It left off.

• Full Shutdown:

This Is pretty much self-explanatory. Your computer Is completely turned off, with all applications terminated, as well as every user account signed out of their active session. On boot up, you'd need to execute and start everything from the beginning.

Whether you're experiencing Issues when shutting down and booting up your computer or simply want to know for Informative purposes, I will demonstrate how to check your last boot session, by using the good old native utility named PowerShell. The process Is extremely simple, with only a single command used. So without further delay, let's get this tutorial started.

Step One:

To access PowerShell, open the Search bar, enter powershell and click the search result at the top as shown below.

Step Two:

PowerShell will now execute, so enter the following command.

Get-WinEvent -ProviderName Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-boot -MaxEvents 10 | Where-Object {$_.message -like “The boot type*”}

If yours looks similar to my command (below), hit the Enter key on your keyboard.

Last Step:

As you can see In my case, the boot type has been returned represented by 0x0. But what does this mean? I'm glad you asked!
Here's a breakdown:

Boot Type       Description
0x0                   Cold boot from full shutdown
0x1                   Fast Startup
0x2                   Resume from hibernation

So my last boot session, represented by the boot type of 0x0, was Cold boot from shutdown.

Final Thoughts:

It really doesn't get any easier than this, does It? The good thing about this, Is not only the fact that It can be performed natively within Windows by using PowerShell, but also that It only takes a single command to display the result.