My Windows 7 Home Premium shuts down slowly. Why?

Question

Why does it take nearly 5 minutes for my computer to stop upon the shutdown command? I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium and the hardware is an i7 with 12GB RAM and lots of storage. The computer is more/less standard, for instance like MS office 2003, Logitech, HP printer drivers, Webroot, Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, Corel Paint and Paint.net, SpeedMaxPC for tuneups, etc.

Is there a list of software somewhere that is constantly running in the background so instead of listing what I have, I could simply double check against the list?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Your Windows 7 is shutting down slowly because of the background programs that are not responding and so you will have to wait for a prolonged time in order for the Windows to shut down properly. There are a few simple tweaks that require minimum knowledge of the operating system so you can achieve a faster shutdown.

Tweaking the registry: Open Start > Run > type regedit and press Enter and navigate to: HKEYCURRENTUSER\Control Panel\Desktop then right click on the right pane and create a new string named WaitToKillAppTimeout and modify it to a value lower than 5000. You could try values between 1000 and 2000. Entering a lower value then the ones recommended would not allow the programs to end correctly.
Another thing is to open Start > Run > and type the following command : shutdown -s -f (-s stands for shutdown and -f is for force applications to shutdown).

To check the list of running programs you should check the Startup tab from msconfig utility (Start > Run > type msconfig and then press enter)

Comments

I am so glad I found this post and your answer! Occasionally over the years, Microsoft Windows security or stability updates result in lengthened "shutting down" page hangs (later updates usually have new versions and cure, but it's annoying meantime); this happened on Patch Tuesday of 01-08-13; this time I found your answer, and it's a great one!

I drilled to my regedit and found WaitToKillAppTimeout already existed, with a value of 8986; I reset it to a value of 3594 (about 40% of default time), rebooted, problem solved...my Windows 7 Home Premium now shuts down in the same time and rate as in six months preceding latest Windows updates. No known system/program jitters, no crashes as of moment, no BSOD(s).

So many other forums and blogs insist it's drivers, or the nonexistant-in-Home Premium grpedit.msc, which cause(s) shutdown screen hangs, it's easy to go asea...thanks again for giving such an obvious and effective short answer for 7 Home Premium users!