So when or if one has not saved a Word document or something similar, and tries to shut down the computer, the computer will give a “cannot shut down because…” message. I left a laptop like that for 40+ minutes (without noticing) and it got quite warm, almost like hot-from-being-overworked warm. Is the computer just at a standstill of sorts, or is it actively trying to force itself to shut down, time after time, and keeps running into a digital brick wall?
Just force the shutdown.
Anytime I have gotten that message that is what I do and that is what I have told other people to do and I and the others have never, ever had a problem with it.
Consider it a warning/chance to save some work in case you forgot before shutting down. Otherwise go for it with no worries.
Or be sure to end all running programs before shutting down.
I think most people know this, but the OP isn’t asking what to do. He or she is asking if the computer may be processing while this message is displayed.
I know that sometimes when Windows does this, if you just wait, it will eventually shut down anyway. This seems to be only with certain processes or applications, though.
To answer the OP’s question we really need to know exactly what the message says. (I seriously doubt that it just says “cannot shut down because…” There has to be more than that.
Just a wild guess: The service which detects that CPU temperature is rising and therefore reduces clock speed is NOT an automatic hardware or firmware service, but is some sort of Windows task. Perhaps that task has already been shut down so the too hot–>slow down service is no longer active.
It was a problem like this that led me to switch my affiliation from Linux to Cygwin. My Toshiba(?) laptop was almost incapable of running Linux because it lacked this too hot–>slow down service. IIRC, I had to insert sleep commands into compute-bound tasks. Googling took me to useless Micro$oft information; responses at the Linux message board all boiled down to “Useless snark is our specialty; we don’t actually know anything.” In the olden days, I made necessary modifications to kernels myself, but a modicum of documentation is prerequisite; and intelligent documentation is often hard to find these days.
It said it couldn’t shut down because a document was open in Adobe Acrobat.
Lots of software has “hooks” open in Windows at various times. It often happens to me with Mozilla – “Mozilla is already open…” No, I shut Mozilla down you stupid … computer… O/S … opensoftwarecrapthingy … Sigh. Yeah, I know, something still open.
Back in the day, when “Multitasking” computers did get confused, and we had to manually close programs and processes in the Windows Task Manager. Windows 10 is much better than Windows 7 or 8 in not needing that.
Listen, I was playing with computers back when people deliberately didn’t run more than one program at a time, if they wanted to be sure the programs wouldn’t crash. I remember when OS/2 Warp was way better when Windows for Workgroups in managing multiple apps, and people were like, “So what, who needs more than one program at a time?”
You can use the Task Manager to see what apps are running processes at any time. A pure novice won’t understand most of them, but you can look up their names in Google, and begin to learn what they are. You may even be able to solve the problem.
When the user requests a logout, restart or shutdown, Windows will politely warn every application that this is about to happen, and wait for confirmation for X seconds. Each application then has the possibility of asking the user if they want to save changes, etc., and then replies to Windows “Yes, we can shut down” or “No, my user has chosen to abort the shutdown”.
If a particular application hasn’t responded to Windows after X seconds, you get “Application YZW is preventing Windows from shutting down”. This could be because the user didn’t notice the question on screen, or because the application is frozen (“not responding”). One way an application can get frozen is if it’s caught in an endless loop, which can cause overheating. A PDF reader shouldn’t have that kind of problem, but Adobe Acrobat is incompetent enough for that.
This is just about the best high-level description you’ll get.
There are nice ways and not nice ways to get programs to shut down. In a perfect world, all applications would expediently close all their file/resource handles and exit out thus unloading themselves from memory upon receiving the shutdown command from the OS. But this is not a perfect world, so programs get stuck in endless loops, or they ignore the shutdown command, or they crash or zombie if they’re waiting on something else that crashed, etc. And the net effect of any of those could be that your OS cannot shutdown [gracefully]. Most OSes have an escalation of force that they can perform on processes where they first ask nicely for them to close but later will forcibly remove them from memory. But the latter can have some negative consequences if for example a process hadn’t finished writing to a file.
Chrome by default keeps a process open.
A major PITA if you routinely run CCleaner. It won’t run and tells you Chrome is open. It confuses our staff because they closed Chrome. That stupid process is in the background.
I go into Chrome’s setting and turn that crap off on every PC in our office.
I run Chrome and Ccleaner; I have never encountered that problem.
I see the Chrome problem on every new pc at work. Until I fix the settings. It’s one of the first things I fix after setting up a new pc
Under show advanced,
"Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed” uncheck the box
Here’s an article.
To Answer the OP’s exact question
If an app has a document open that is unsaved, windows asks the app to close that app says NO i will not close, i need to speak with the user.
The app wants you to save or chose not to save when ever it has open.
So windows will simply hold the shut down process with a message for the user asking if they want to force the shut down, or cancel the shut down to interact with the app.
It is not trying to force the shut down, it is waiting on you.
It is still running at that point and the app or apps needing your attention are still running and everyone is simply waiting on you.
Why it might seem warmer, i dont know, it may not do some of its normal things
in the line of thermal and energy management since it is technically in the shutdown sequence and so probably wont go into sleep mode or turn off HDD etc.
The stealthware has to finish the batch of bitcoin it was minting and log off the PLA’s server.