Cannot shut Windows 7 down

[klerrick]

Hi, all. Hopefully, someone can help me with this one!

I have a Dell XPS1530 laptop and lately, I have been experiencing issues with shutting the system down. I have Windows 7 loaded onto it (32-bit) which I installed shortly after Christmas of last year.

What happens is this:

I will turn the laptop on to do some work - that can range from transferring music from iTunes to my phone, working in Microsoft Word, or using Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator. I will work on something anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours and when I finish up, I close all of the programs before I go to shutdown the machine.

I click the Windows button in the lower-left of my screen and select "Shutdown" but nothing happens. I will wait up to 15 minutes and still NOTHING. If I try and open a program like Firefox it won't open after I've selected "Shutdown." It's like the machine is stuck on something.

Also, I tried running my virus software to see if there was a problem, but it got stuck around 89% done and just sat there for 12 hours before I told it to stop.

I am not a computer guy - a dabbler at best, so I was hoping someone would know what to do/help me out!

Please let me know if you need any more information - I am sure I am leaving out some important information!

Thanks!!

 

[DeaconFrost]

Typically, this is due to a running process that doesn't want to let go. The solution is often time consuming, but you need to make a list of running processes, and then manually close the process in task manager...then shut down. If you mark which ones you tried, at some point the system will shut down, and you'll know which process is causing the hang.

 

[Brink]

Hello Klerrick, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Until you narrow down what program or process is causing the shutdown process to hang, you might see if using the "Instant Shutdown Computer" shortcut in the tutorial below may be able to work for you.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61294-shut-down-computer-shortcut-create.html

Hope this helps for now,
Shawn