New to XP, ran 98se for years and I find that XP is taking longer and longer to shut down. Over 60 seconds now. seems worse if I have done a lot of deleting and emptying of the recycle bin during the session.
Does XP save all house keeping for the shut down cycle?
I have checked for stuff running in the back ground, malware, spyware. zoombie add on’s, etc. I seem good there.
98 would shut down in just a few seconds.
My XP install is slowly getting worse.
I only have 21 gigs used of an 150 GIG hard drive, (10,000 RPM drive)
The cpu seems slow but i would do a start>run>msconfig and uncheck everything you do not need. also check out ccleaner and have it delete files and do a reg clean. xp does not clear page file on shut down by deafult.
I’ve found that several drivers on Windows 2000 and XP can get corrupted, leading to awful performance, particularly shutdown times. The easiest way of fixing this is to run the System File Checker (make sure you have your install disk):
Start -> Run
Then type in “sfc /scannow” (without the quotes) and press enter.
It’ll trundle along for a while, scanning system files, and it may or may not find corrupted files. WARNING: it will also look for ‘changed’ system files; the best idea in this case if you’re not sure what you’re doing is to ignore this. If it finds any files that are corrupted, you will be informed, and given the option to restore them.
XP starts faster than 98 (sorta - XP cheats to make itself look faster) but XP is much slower to shut down than 98. That’s just the nature of the beast. You aren’t ever going to get it to shut down as fast as 98.
That said, 60 seconds is a bit long. I had an issue with my father-in-law’s computer where it took a very long time to shut down. It ended up being a trial version of software that had come with the computer that he didn’t use, but the trial period had expired. Once I uninstalled that program, the problem went away.
One thing you can do is run msconfig and just disable everything. If that fixes the problem, go in and re-enable things one by one until you find out who is causing the slowdown.
I was having extremely long shut down times on my desktop. As in up to 5 minutes. I downloaded a registry cleaner, and did some dusting and cleaning. There were something like 950 errors found in my registry. After cleaning them out my shut down times are well under 30 seconds now.
The program I used was WinASO registry optimizer. If you are cheap, or short on funds there is a free trial version that will allow you to clean ten items at a time, so if you have a free evening you can get it all done.
I am told that Uniblue Registry Booster2 is also quite good, but the trail will only clean 10 items once, then you have to pony up the $29.95