Advanced BootInforma Released

Turning On Verbose Status Messages During Windows Boot, Logon, and Shutdown

By default, Windows shows a plain progress spinner while it boots, logs on, or shuts down — which looks clean, but hides exactly what the machine is doing at each stage. If you’re troubleshooting a slow boot, a logon script hanging, or a shutdown that seems to stall, turning on verbose status messages shows you the actual process names and stages Windows is working through in real time. To enable it via Group Policy (or Local Group Policy Editor on a single machine):

1. Open Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System.
2. Enable “Display highly detailed status messages.”

The same setting is available as a registry value if you’d rather push it without Group Policy:

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System" /v VerboseStatus /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

This is genuinely useful during your own testing — but just as easy to have it appear repeatedly on freshly-imaged machines during rollout if you bake it into a base image by mistake, so remember to turn it back off once you’re done troubleshooting if it isn’t something you want end users to see routinely.

Still There in Current Windows (Updated for 2026)

This is one of the more stable corners of Windows Group Policy — “Display highly detailed status messages” has been part of Administrative Templates > System since long before Windows 10, and the same setting, along with the matching VerboseStatus registry value, is still present under the same path in current Windows 11 releases. The caution about baking it into a base or reference image still applies too: it’s a genuinely useful diagnostic during your own testing, but it’s an easy thing to forget to strip back out before you capture and roll out an image, and end users generally don’t want to see raw process names flashing past on every logon and shutdown.