Back in the 1990s, my fellow PC chums and I thought we had stumbled across a magic trick with Windows 95, something that we thought nobody else knew about: holding the shift key when you hit restart ...

Shift+Restart in Windows 95 triggers a fast restart that skips a full reboot. win.com used a restart flag, shut down kernels, dropped to real mode, then relaunched protected mode. If win.com's ...