What To Do When . . .Your PC Shuts Down Slowly Or Won’t Shut Down At All

It seems to happen at the worst time: You’re in a hurry and when you shut down your computer, you get an hourglass that spins and a computer that fails to shut down quickly or at all. This has happened to many other people. And while you could simply pull the plug on your PC or hit its power switch, you may know from previous experience that failing to properly shut down a PC results in an extended boot process. That’s because improperly shutting down your computer forces Windows to check your system’s hard drive for data errors. Shutdown issues are among the common types of problems you’ll encounter with Windows. Read on for some simple steps you can take to make shutdown a faster process.

Basic Troubleshooting & Maintenance
Sometimes the simplest thing at the root of a slow shutdown is the most overlooked. Proper maintenance is essential to good hard drive function. All versions of Windows 98 and later have a built-in drive Cleanup Utility. Cleaning your drive not only helps you liberate some extra hard drive space, but it can also help improve overall operating system performance including system shutdown. To access the Cleanup Utility, open the Start menu; select Programs (All Programs in Windows XP), Accessories, and System Tools; and click Disk Cleanup. Another maintenance task is the regular defragmenting of the hard drive. If you have a heavily fragmented hard drive, the OS has to search the drive for all the pieces of scattered data. The longer your OS has to search, the slower all functions become. To defragment your system, navigate to System

Tools and click Disk Defragmenter.
Although many PCs on the market these days have just about all the peripherals you would want, some systems also offer an abundance of USB ports for connecting additional hardware. If you suspect that a recently added USB device is causing a slow shutdown, it’s possible the added peripheral doesn’t support the Selective Suspend power management feature. To correct this, try disabling the Power Management option for your USB hub. Right-click My Computer and select Properties. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button. Expand Universal Serial Bus controllers, right-click USB Root Hub, and select Properties. Next, click the Power Management tab, clear the Allow The Computer To Turn Off This Device To Save Power checkbox, and click OK.

When Your System Hangs
One of the most commonly encountered Windows problems is when you shut down your computer and the process takes an excessive amount of time to complete. The OS is made up of a collection of small programs; therefore your computer must end each program individually during shutdown. Any anomaly in just one of these smaller programs can prolong shutdown or cause the process to fail.

Delays follow a new installation. If you experience shutdown delays and you installed new apps recently, you’ll want to determine if the new programs are the cause. Try uninstalling the programs starting with the last one first. In Windows, the last program you install will appear at the end of your Start menu list of applications. That is, unless you sorted this list by name. Then you’ll need to do a little searching. When uninstalling a program, you can use the application’s built-in uninstall feature (located in its folder entry in the Start menu) or the Add Or Remove Programs utility (click Start, select Control Panel, and double-click Add Or Remove Programs). After removing the program in question, restart your machine and attempt the shutdown again. If your PC shuts down properly, you’ll know the application was the cause. One note: Before you remove the suspected application, you may want to check the manufacturer’s.

Web site for patches and/or updates that may be available for you to download and make the program operate correctly. Trouble stems from an update. When you initiate the Windows shutdown procedure from the Start menu, Windows may prompt you for some type of user input when an app crashes or fails to respond. When this happens, Windows halts the shutdown process until you permit Windows to stop the nonresponsive application. Fortunately, there is a temporary workaround for this situation. By making a simple adjustment to Windows’ Registry, you can instruct WinXP to automatically close pesky crashed applications.

Before tweaking the Registry, you should back up your system in case you need to return it to a previous setting. For specific instructions on backing up the Registry, visit the Microsoft Help And Support article at support.microsoft.com/kb/322756. After you create the backup, open the Start menu, click Run, type regedit in the Open field, and click OK. In Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\CONTROLPANEL\DESKTOP. Double-click AutoEndTasks in the right panel, type a 1 in the Value Data field, and click OK. Close Registry Editor and restart your machine. Now when you shut down your computer, WinXP can close any applications that hang, and it will do so without any further input from you during the process.

If you experience shutdown problems after installing updates, new drivers, or software, you can usually return your PC to its preupdate condition using System Restore. Open the Start menu; select All Programs, Accessories, and System tools and then click System Restore. By default, WinXP enables System Restore on all your computer’s hard drives provided you have enough hard drive space (about 200MB). After rolling back to a restore point, start up and shut down your PC once or twice to confirm the slow shutdown problem is resolved. It’s important to note that System Restore isn’t a substitute for uninstalling a program. Therefore, you will need to remove the offending application as we previously mentioned. System issues occur after adding new a profile. You recently added a new profile on your computer for a family member and now your system hangs at logoff or when you shut down the system. The biggest reason for this problem is Windows is unable to unload a user profile because system processes and/or apps occasionally maintain connections to Registry keys in the user profile even after the user logs off. Microsoft’s Download Center (www.microsoft.com/downloads) provides User Profile Hive Cleanup Service, a free utility that cleans user profiles. The utility is available for registered Windows users, and it is specifically engineered to make certain that user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off.

Slow shutdown occures after enabling the Clear Page file On System Shutdown option. Although it is true that clearing the page file on system shutdown will delete all data stored there so others can’t retrieve it, doing this does substantially increase shutdown time. The page file works as virtual memory (storage) in WinXP and can, on occasion, grow to mammoth proportions. Because some third party applications could use the page file to temporarily store sensitive information in virtual memory, some people prefer to set their machines to clear the page file at shutdown. If you think your system is running slow because you enabled the Clear Page file option, you can tweak the Registry and make things run quicker. Back up your system first. Then open the Registry Editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\SESSIONMANAGER\MEMORYMANAGEMENT. Double-click Clear Page File At Shutdown in the right panel and set the Value Data field to 0.

System Delays & Increased Internet Activity
Despite our best efforts, viruses and spyware sometimes take refuge in our PCs causing systems to shut down slowly or worse, not at all. If you suspect your system has a virus, make sure you update your virus signatures and run a complete scan on your machine. Antivirus alone is not enough these days, so good spyware prevention software is a must. Microsoft’s WindowsDefender (free; www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx) scans your system to ferret out spyware that could be slowing down your PC.

Take Action
Although some people have learned to live with their computers’ slow shutdown times, that doesn’t need to be the case. Proactive intervention will certainly speed up a computer’s shutdown process, and it may eliminate most of the common problems altogether.