If it seems to take Windows forever to shut down,
the culprit might be all those services that it has running because
Windows has to shut down each service one by one before it can shut
down the PC. In each case, Windows waits a certain amount of time for
the service to close, and if it hasn’t closed in that time, Windows
kills the service. It’s that waiting for services to shut themselves
down that can really bring the shutdown process to its knees.
However,
most services shut down as soon as they get the command from Windows.
So although it’s polite of Windows to give some services a bit of extra
time, it’s really wasted time because in most cases Windows is just
going to have to kill those slow services anyway. So in that case, you
should configure Windows 7 to tell it to kill services faster. Here’s
how:
1. | Select Start, type regedit, and then press Enter. The Registry Editor appears.
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2. | Navigate to the following key:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
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3. | Double-click the WaitToKillServiceTimeout setting.
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4. | Reduce the value from 20000 to 1000.
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5. | Click OK.
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Tip
You
can also reduce the amount of time that Windows 7 waits before killing
running applications at shutdown. In the Registry Editor, navigate to
the following key:
HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop
Double-click the WaitToKillAppTimeout setting. (If you don’t see this setting, select Edit, New, String Value, type WaitToKillAppTimeout, and click OK.) Change the value to 5000, and click OK
