How to fix system muted on startup on Windows 10
Windows 10 bugs will never fail to surprise users when the crop up. Normally, you can count on a clean installation of the OS to be bug-free. In fact, in most cases where users are dealing with bugs that simply will not go away, a clean install is often the cure. That said, even a clean install can still have bugs and one of those rather odd bugs is that the system is muted every time you boot to your desktop. It may also happen when you restart it or wake it from sleep but you can expect it to happen after a shut down, and start. The cause is unknown but the cure is simple.
Here’s a neat trick for setting the system volume on lock and unlock and for changing it based on time of day.
Fix system muted on startup
In order to fix your system from automatically muting on startup, you need to disable Fast startup. Fast startup allows a system to boot up much more quickly and it does so by not really shutting down when you shut your system down. As a user, you select the shut down option from the power menu but really, Windows 10 is entering a different sort of off-state which it can boot back up from much more quickly. This means you’re not getting the full benefit of a proper shut down which is, in turn, giving you problems like this.
To turn off Fast startup, open File Explorer and enter the following in the location bar. This will open the Control Panel’s power options panel.
Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options
Click the ‘Choose what the power buttons do’ option on the left.
On the next screen, click the ‘Change settings that are currently unavailable’ option. Scroll down on the same screen.
Uncheck the ‘Turn on fast startup’ option, and click Save Changes. When you next shut down and boot up your system, the volume will be at whatever level you set it to before shutting your system down. You should know that most audio drivers allow Windows 10 to set the volume on a per-device basis so the volume you get when you boot to your desktop will be for the audio device that’s currently active.
Fast startup is supposed to get users to their desktop much quicker but it ends up causing the most unusual problems. Most people disable it straight away even if it isn’t causing problems simply because having it enabled means that your system isn’t really shutting down when you tell it to.
