Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Shut Down Windows Quickly

Theoretically, when you shut down Windows, your computer should be powered down in less than 15 seconds. The problem is that all of the cleanup Windows tries to do before it considers it "safe" to power the system down can sometimes cause delays. This includes shutting down your open applications, stopping any running services, and writing any pending cache data to the disk.

During the course of using your computer, Windows sometimes postpones writing data to the disk to improve performance. This is called write caching, and as a consequence, Windows must take a few seconds before you shut down to make sure all data queued to be written is actually, physically written to the disk before power is lost.

Of course, the most effective way to speed up shutdown is to not shut down at all. Rather, put your PC to sleep. That way, you won't have to close your documents, bookmark open web pages, or even quit your games; they'll all still be where you left them when you wake up and resume your previous session.

Of course, it's good for Windows to shut down completely from time to time. If you sleep your PC exclusively, it may mean you'll be operating under the same Windows session for weeks or even months, and that can cause Windows to slow down and become even more unreliable.

When shutting down, Windows attempts to stop all running tasks. If a task- an application, service, or background program-doesn't respond or refuses to shut down, there's a built-in delay before Windows will force the task to end. This delay is called the timeout, and it can be shortened if you're experiencing problems or unreasonable delays every time you shut down your system.

1. Open the Registry Editor.
2. Expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.
3. Double-click the WaitToKillAppTimeout value. (If it's not there, select Edit → New → DWORD Value (32-bit) and type WaitToKillAppTimeout for the name of the new value.) This number controls the time to wait, in milliseconds, before unresponsive applications are forced to close. The default is 20000 (20 seconds), but you can type any value here; the minimum is 1 millisecond, although it's impractical to use any value smaller than about 2000 (2 seconds) here.
4. Also in this key is the HungAppTimeout value, which does pretty much the same thing as WaitToKillAppTimeout; just enter the same number for both values.
5. Next, you can configure 7 to end hung applications automatically and without asking. Select Edit → New → DWORD Value (32-bit) and type AutoEndTasks for the name of the new value. Then, double-click AutoEnd Tasks and enter 1 (one) to automatically end tasks or 0 (zero) to prompt before ending tasks (the default).
6. Expand the branches to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control.
7. Double-click the WaitToKillServiceTimeout value. This works the same as the WaitToKillAppTimeout value described above, except that it applies to services (managed in services.msc) instead of applications.
8. Close the Registry Editor when you're done. You'll have to restart Windows for the change to take effect.

These values also affect the timeouts at times other than just shutting down, such as when you click End Process or End Task in Task Manager. In most cases, however, these values won't affect applications that delay shut down merely because they're waiting for you to save an open document.