What takes Windows so long to shut down on my laptop?
I’m running WinXP on a Compaq Presario laptop, and when I try to shut down the machine, it shuts down slowly–sometimes it takes as long as five minutes to fully shut down. In a couple of cases, it hasn’t shut down at all, and I’ve had to pull the AC power and the battery to turn it off.
Looking at Task Manager, I don’t see anything really out of the ordinary running that would cause a longer-than-average shutdown–mostly System tasks are listed, with a few listed as User (these seem to be mosty virus and spyware checkers). The machine tends to run slowly anyway; the virus checker (Norton) seems to have to check every single thing I do/open/close/save, etc. Not sure if there a connection between this and the inability to shut down quickly though, but I thought I should mention it.
Does anybody know why shutdowns are too slow, and what can I do about it?
My laptop (also a Compaq Presario - R400 series, bought about a year and a half ago) also takes forever to shut down. I don’t really bring it anywhere, so it stays plugged in by the couch all the time, but more often than not, when I have to shut it down, I just end up doing a hard shutdown by pressing and holding the power button for a while. I don’t have the Norton virus checker, so I have a feeling it might be for another reason than that.
I don’t know about the download AmbushBug suggested - it might work.
Systems that take a long time to shut down generally do so because they have a poor CPU or overall RAM.
I run two PCs one I use for web browsing it runs a 2.8GHz 515 P4 with 256MB of RAM and has a page file at start up of no more than 170MB (should be less than 200MB for a well maintained system.)
The second PC I use for gaming and is a 3.5 overclocked 630 P4 with 2Gb of RAM and has a page file of 180MB at start up (ergo it runs more background tasks).
The first PC takes over 3 minutes to shut down, the second will shut down in less than 30 seconds and that includes the time to shut down the application I am running.
The issue is mostly the Windows XP recovery. For anyone that’s had to recover an XP system that worked one day and suddenly doesn’t work the the next time it turns on there is an option that says ‘use last know good configuration.’ Where does this configuration come from? Well it comes from the settings saved by XP when you shut down your PC. XP creates a recovery point and stores your system settings, which can take along time especially if you also have AV and Anti-Spyware that is keeping tabs on everything XP is doing.
First place to start is disable the Windows Recovery (only if you feel confident you won;t require it in future)
Secondly physically disable Anti-Spyware and Anti-virus software yourself before you shut Windows down.
Now finally the biggest problem Windows sometimes has is with non responsive programs, these can be a real bind as they require the user to physically tell Windows to shut them down before it will do anything. Fortunatly you can make a few registery adjustments that tell Windows to shut these down by itself. Though because these do require registery adjustements I won’t detail them just now unless someone is really wanting them.
Now finally finally, NEVER ever do a hard shut down of Windows unless it is a total last resort. If you’re lucky you’ll just corrupt a system file that can be easily recovered from the XP install disc, if you’re unlucky you’ll suffer a disc crash and end up damaging your Hard Drive.