Win XP Taking ages to shutdown

tbh · 31-10-2006 10:18am #1

Hi Guys,

I have a Dell Latitude D600, 512 MB RAM, 1.6 Ghz pentium (1400Mhz) running XP pro 5.1.2600.

As the title suggests, I find that when I try to shutdown the machine, it can take upwards of five minutes to shut down - is this normal? For about four minutes it says "Saving your settings..." and then "Windows is shutting down" is displayed briefly before it powers off.

Anyone any ideas how I can find out what the system is doing as it's displaying the "Saving your settings" message? or maybe this is normal behaviour - my g/f has a similar spec and hers shuts down in about 30 seconds or so.

thanks,
tbh.

daywalker · 31-10-2006 12:54pm

does it take a similar amount of time to start-up, when windows is shutting down it stops all the processes that are running and saves any system data in memory to disk, but this process can take a while if processes/programs are refusing to stop running, so windows waits a while before forcing them to stop.

If you were to turn on the laptop and then immediately do shutdown does it still take 5 mins to turn off?

tbh · 31-10-2006 1:56pm

yeah, it does take a while to startup alright - and it takes ages to shutdown no matter how quickly I turn it off, that's whats so puzzling! I tried disabling different things, I thought maybe google desktop was the culprit, but shutting them off doesn't seem to have made a difference...is there anyway I can disable it saving before a shutdown, or should I not do that?

jman0 · 31-10-2006 3:08pm

It's probably some service still running, like anti-virus sw.
Before you shutdown, open Task Manager -> Processes and see what's all running.

Also, how much free space do you have on your main drive?
When was the last time you ran Error Checking and Defrag?

tbh · 31-10-2006 3:15pm

jman0 wrote:

It's probably some service still running, like anti-virus sw.
Before you shutdown, open Task Manager -> Processes and see what's all running.

you're not from donegal by any chance are ya?

jman0 wrote:

Also, how much free space do you have on your main drive?
When was the last time you ran Error Checking and Defrag?

[/quote]

have about 4g free, good point about the error checking and defrag, I'll try that out - thanks for the help lads.

feylya · 31-10-2006 3:20pm

Might be a stupid question but do you have many large files on your desktop?

tbh · 31-10-2006 3:23pm

Nothing major, but I do have shortcuts to large folders, if that has any significance?

thanks for all the help btw

feylya · 31-10-2006 3:25pm

I was just thinking about Roaming Profiles having to upload all the contents of the Desktop to the server. Wondering if it was similar with Local Profiles. Just a shot in the dark really.

Yerac · 31-10-2006 3:31pm

Do you have any external devices attached like a hard-disk?

I've got an external firewire drive attached which slows shutdown significantly.

Thrill · 31-10-2006 3:39pm

There appears to be a few reasons for slow shutdowns.

Google this: slow shutdown

Browse a few of the sites. pretty good explanation on this one...

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/windows_shutdown_restart_and_boot_take_forever.html

.

daywalker · 31-10-2006 3:53pm

try Start->run->msconfig and remove all the items from startup, restart the laptop and then try shutting down and see if it still takes as long, if not then its probably one of the programs that runs at startup which is causing the problem. You could also try making note of all the items in startup and googling them to check which is essential and which is not needed.

Win XP Taking ages to shutdown

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