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I'm not sure if this is a programming question exactly, but it does affect my work quite a bit. I have a project I'm working on where a program has to perform certain tasks on startup. The project itself is no problem, but testing it is. Windows XP and Vista is taking a long time to shutdown.

When Windows tries to shut down the hard drive sometimes seems to thrash constantly. It can take from 1 to 3 minutes with the windows screen sitting there saying "Shutting down please wait." There is no indication of what is happening and I can't seem to monitor the process because any programs I try to leave running get terminated. Restarts seem to go bit faster.

I've disabled automatic windows updates so that's the problem. I've also ran anti-virus and anti-spyware programs and the system appears to be clean. I generally have a few browser windows open, putty, python and visual studio.

  1. Why does Windows XP/Vista take so long to shutdown sometimes but not all the time?
  2. What exactly happens during the shutdown process?
  3. Is there anything I can do to speed up the shutdown process?

Thank you

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  • I'm struggling to see the programming angle here...
    – skaffman
    Commented Aug 17, 2009 at 20:51
  • Should go on SuperUser probably.
    – EBGreen
    Commented Aug 17, 2009 at 20:58
  • Re #3, Ivo had a trick in the Windows tweaks thread superuser.com/questions/3864/….
    – hyperslug
    Commented Aug 17, 2009 at 21:09
  • You can make Windows shutdown faster by changing how long it waits for services and applications to be killed with a few registry tweaks as described in this article.
    – martineau
    Commented Aug 6, 2012 at 19:00

4 Answers 4

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Windows services takes the most of shutdown time. Some services, like those that have network-related shutdown operations or have to save large amounts of data to disk, might require more time and so Windows Vista allows a service to request pre-shutdown notification. When Windows Vista shuts down, the Service Control Manager first notifies those services asking for pre-shutdown notification. It will wait indefinitely for these services to exit, but if they have a bug and don't respond to queries, the Service Control Manager gives up and moves on after three minutes.

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I'm not sure if you're already doing this, but exiting all programs manually (including any in the systray) before shutting down speeds up the process for me.

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Windows also saves settings on shutdown. The longer you keep your computer on you will notice it takes longer to shut down.

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Leaving certain programs open can slow shutdown, too. For example, it can take upwards of a minute to shut down if I leave uTorrent (for linux distros, of course) open, but closer to 15 seconds otherwise. It's no exact amounts, but closing off apps that constantly download/upload/disk I/O could help.

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