The description sums it up. Mainly that's what I love about Win9x. You could terminate the Windows session, fall back to DOS and restart the Windows session without wasting time going through POST.

I know that NT doesn't use DOS to boot, but, speaking of this, is it possible to fall back to the NT boot manager and start XP from it again ?

Edited May 8, 200917 yr by BogdanV

Not on real hardware, no. The NT boot manager and SMSS.exe literally shut everything down during a shutdown and then call the BIOS to reboot the box. I suppose you could consider rewriting your own kernel to handle this differently, but with the stock kernel this isn't possible.

Thanks for your reply, although if I'm not mistaken, in Windows 2000, if you shutdown the system via Progman, the BIOS wouldn't turn the power off, instead the PC would halt in 256 colors, 640x480 with a message box stating that "it is safe to turn off your computer now", so probably the OS closed most essential parts of it.

But then again, I don't think you could trigger the boot manager or anything similar without coding a trigger within the kernel, even though the system would turn itself off without cutting power to the PC, so its back to your post.

Thanks for your reply, although if I'm not mistaken, in Windows 2000, if you shutdown the system via Progman, the BIOS wouldn't turn the power off, instead the PC would halt in 256 colors, 640x480 with a message box stating that "it is safe to turn off your computer now", so probably the OS closed most essential parts of it.

But then again, I don't think you could trigger the boot manager or anything similar without coding a trigger within the kernel, even though the system would turn itself off without cutting power to the PC, so its back to your post.

This happens on XP as well, as long as you have NOT ACPI.

See this, JFYI:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3717

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...=3717&st=26

jaclaz