Why can't Windows shut down promptly?

Back in the old days when TVs and radios had tubes, it took a couple of minutes for a set to warm up before you could watch or listen. But even then, you could turn it off instantly. That's not true with Windows PCs. Not only does it sometimes take seemingly forever for them to boot, but it can take several minutes for one to shut down. Even worse, if a program stops responding, you may or may not be able to shut it down. And even if it does terminate, it may take awhile.

And by the way, I'm not just talking about Windows XP and Vista. I'm having the same problem with Windows 7 though, to be fair, the new operating system is still in beta so it's possible that Microsoft could amaze and delight me by fixing this in the final version.




Why can't Windows shut down promptly? | Larry Magid at Large - CNET News

the problems with shutdown thus far have been with other apps not shutting down correctly which hangs the shutdown time. Major issues have been with sidebar itself and some gadgets themselves. Norton360 was a pain, framework would crash or not respond at various times. If not that then usually it has to do with the installation of programs or heavy install of in one cycle.

I have ran into this, but i have troubleshot most of the problems and have figured out the causes of most if any hangs now, and am still happy with the setup i have reflective to any changes that had to be made. A few i have to manually startup, but after sometime now on 7000, MS fixed the problem with this particular app. First they sent me the recommendation of manually starting up. After about a month of use on the desktop i had to use it on the lappy, and low and behold MS had fixed that startup issue with that app. Norton tried to fix this issue with this app itself by trying to delay the startup, which did work, but i pitched norton cuz of the framework crashing.

also, the lappy (less powerful) shuts down faster and starts up faster... but not many programs installed on it as desktop, just some gadgets running. go figure

7000, 7057 and now 7068 have never been an issue. I actually think as the build has progressed then so the has those actions you mention get quicker. That has been my experience thus far.