M17X R1 Second HDD quandary

So, I use a 160 GB hitachi for my primary/OS. I used to have a 320 GB WD drive for just storage and programs. A few months ago the computer started taking forever to shut down, and one day I got impatient, unplugged it mid 'logging off' screen, and I lost the WD drive. I restored it later, checked everything out for viruses/malware/MBR trojans and whatever, and it checked out clean.

But now, I'm having the same problem again. The single primary drive, upon clicking shut down, would shutdown within a minute (I noticed it would stall on 'logging off' if the fans were still blazing, ie. I JUST finished gaming). But now that the second drive is back, formatted, and has its files again, the shutdown procedure takes like 3-4 minutes now, which is ridiculous. I ran a benchmark on both drives (both have between 30-45 GB's free space). I know it's an SSD benchmark, I'm not blind. I just happened to have it on my desktop and figured it'd make little difference.

Also, not sure if this is a Win7 problem, or an M17x problem


primary - 30GB free


secondary - 45GB free




Your thoughts?

 

Sounds like Windows is hanging during shutdown. That = a software problem. There are ways to troubleshoot this. I did it once for slow startup and found it was trying to load a driver that wasn't on my system! Pulled that line out of the registry and problem solved! Wish I could remember how I did it....but if you google windows slow shutdown or terms like that I think you can figure it out. Alternatively if you remove (completely) windows and reinstall it should fix the problem. I recommend a complete C drive backup before the reinstall which will likely reformat and/or repartition your drive.