Have you ever looked at the Windows login screen on your monitor and thought, "Wait a minute, didn't I tell you to shut it down?"

Have you ever wondered.

For a while, I doubted myself: maybe I told Windows to "update and reboot" instead of "update and shut down". And maybe I should have gone to check the burners on the stove.

But it wasn't me. When I mentioned this experience at a conference recently, another PC Gamer editor said, wait a minute, you did too?

Windows has sporadically ignored the "restart and shutdown" option since at least 2021. Someone asked on the official Windows forums how a PC could reboot without shutting down. Then about 8 months ago, a dozen people reported the problem in a Reddit thread. That's when the same thing started happening to me.

"This weird bug makes it unreliable to select 'refresh and shutdown' at the end of the workday," wrote a Reddit poster.

"It works about 50% of the time, but I often have to reboot 2-3 times before it finishes applying the update and I end up at the login screen. If I leave my laptop on battery power, it is dead when I find it the next morning.

Some people say the bug occurs every time Windows needs to be rebooted multiple times to apply an update, but I'm not sure. It seems to reboot only once, regardless of whether I update and shut down or update and reboot, and in the 2021 thread someone said it was a BIOS issue, so why not try updating the motherboard firmware?

Interestingly, if you go back quite a bit in the Google search results, you will find people complaining that the "update and shut down" feature does exactly that. Instead of rebooting to finish the update, they were leaving the PC shut down and finishing the update on the next boot.

Well, that is not ideal either. The best version of the system would "remember" to reboot as often as needed and shut down on demand; Windows 11 seems to work that way. But it doesn't.

I can't find any official Microsoft support comment on this, but it may be my fault for not maintaining my motherboard, so I'll refrain from ranting here about a long-standing Windows bug. (I can't really guess why a slightly older BIOS would have anything to do with this, and it probably doesn't.)

Mainly, I just wanted to let those of you who have had this experience know that you have not lost touch with reality. You locked your car. You turned off the oven. Then you clicked "Update and Shutdown."