Windows 7: Slow shutdown (2-3 minutes)

ASUS P8Z68-V LX
Intel i5
8GB Kingston DDR3
WD SATA6 and Seagate SATA1
Windows 7 Professional

Hi

My machine is taking a 2-3 minutes to shutdown (blue screen with windows logo saying shutting down with swirling circle to the left).

I have searched this forum for similar posts and have taken screen shots (see here) of the Task Manager processes running, the msconfig startup and the waittokillservicetimeout screen in the registry.

I have gone into the msconfig and disabled all services (made no difference).



Any ideas?

TIA

Please shut down after all the open programs have been closed and advise the time taken to shut down. Looking at the running processes a number of programs including IE seem to be running.

After this test we shall try the close a number of programs in start-up that appear unnecessary and retest.

Take a look at this tutorial. Maybe it will speed up shutdown time.
Shut Down -Speed Up

Check that you haven't got the paging (aka swap) file set to clear on shutdown. See Virtual Memory Paging File - Clear at Shutdown - Vista Forums

This Microsoft forum answer may help you isolate the problem:

Windows 7 is very slow to shutdown - Microsoft Answers

Hi,

Shut down all 'open programs' - by that do you mean:

1. End process in task manager of all programs running under my user name?
2. Disable all processes in msconfig startup?

Thanks

M

Hi

The first one talks about speeding it up from 12 seconds to 2 seconds, I'd be happy with 12 seconds as I currently close on 150 seconds.

The other two I am happy to try and I'm comfortable tinkering with the registry but before I do that I would like it to be a bit more targetted if possible?

Thanks

M

What I mean is close all the program windows open or minimized on the Desktop.

With all progams closed (apart from anything running in the background e.d. exploere.exe. and dwm.exe etc.) and all process disabled in the msconfig startup it takes about 120 to 150 seconds

Hello Michael,

Hardly shows any improvement. Suggest you read the tips at My Computer and Windows 7 Optimization Guide: Reduce Windows 7 Boot Time and Shut Down and try them out.

Amarnath Wanchoo

Hi

Does anybody know the shutdown routine? I presume the system will go through a set routine of doing stuff before it switches off? Does it, for example check any hardware?

TIA

OK - shutdown now comes in 12 seconds! What did I do?

I modified the clearpagefileatshutdown in the registry from 1 to 0.

It appears (correct me if I am wrong) that this command in the registry (for security reasons) deletes the information in the page file (virtual memory on the HDD).

I kinda like the idea of stuff being deleted from my virtual memory, so the question follows; could I have solved this problems by reducing the size of my virtual memory?

I have two HDD inside my box and the system reports that the size of my page file is 8103mb (I don't know if that is the same for both drives). I have 8GB of RAM so do I really need 8GB of virtual memory?