Sloooow XP Shutdown
Fred, You've had many discussions on optimizing the Windows XP boot-up time, but I'm now experiencing a slow shut down time. After clicking Start/Shut Down, there is often times a long period of time before the shut down dialogue window pops up. This is even after I've closed all open programs. I think this slow shut down time can sometimes relate to hard drive intensive activities involving a lot of temporary file storage, and the hard drive is spending time purging these files. I can correlate this to when I had recorded CD's or DVD's during a session. But other times I only had the computer on to read email (in Outlook) and/or do a little web browsing. What else can be slowing my shut down time and what can I do about it? Thanks for the great newsletter. ---Greg Ray
There are a few normal activities that can cause a shutdown delay--- closing/purging temporary files is one, as you state. Some users set various cleanup tasks to run at shutdown, and that slows things down as well, of course. On system with a lot of RAM and/or a slow hard drive, Hibernation can take a noticeable chunk of time. And so on.
Beyond the more or less obvious, one common cause of shutdown delays is a driver that won't let go; one that does not respond to the "terminate" command from the OS. (Some printer and CDR drivers seem to be especially prone to this.) So, one thing you can do is ensure that all your drivers are up to date with recent, known-good (check the BBSes or Google Groups) versions.
You can also troubleshoot the issue more scientifically. XP has a built in "Startup and Shutdown Troubleshooter" although it doesn't go very far. Still, it's a place to start: Go to Start/Help and Support and use "shutdown" as the search term, and under "Fix a Problem" select the "Startup and Shutdown Troubleshooter."
Many other troubleshooting tools exist, too:
http://www.google.com/search?q=trouble+slow+shutdown+xp
And you also can brute-force a shutdown. The command
shutdown -s -f
typed into the Start/Run line or used as the guts of a batch file will tell the OS to force (-f) a shutdown (-s) even if some software or driver doesn't acknowledge the termination command.
And, for completeness,
shutdown -r -f
does the same thing, but with a reboot (-r) instead of a shutdown. For more about "shutdown" command options, go to Start/Help and Support and use "shutdown" as the search term, and under "Pick a task" select "Shutdown."
If using an external program is easier, try the free Wizmo ( http://www.google.com/search?as_q=wizmo&as_sitesearch=langa.com ). The commands
Wizmo shutdown!
Wizmo reboot!
(with the exclamation points) are the Wizmo equivalent of "shutdown -s -f" and "shutdown -r -f"
Naturally, fixing the problem is best; but at least the above can get you past the problem in the meantime.
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