Slow Shut Down?

My windows 7 professional takes forever to shut down. Start up is blazing fast due to my SSD & Tweaks, but everytime I try to shut down it takes ages. I upgraded from windows 7 home. System in my sig, figure i'd try here before I try to reformat.

 

dont know if these all work with 7 as they are for vista but worth a look Tips & Tweaks

 

My advice is try to know what is wrong before "tweaking". You can check what process is slowing the shut down of your system in the Event Register.

You can look in the event logs that are registered in the Event register, under Diagnostics-Performance, numbered with 200. In particular the events that show the lags are the 20X.

 

Does it actually shut down properly eventually, or does it eventually BSOD, or what? Whereabouts does it get stuck?

 

It shuts down properly, it's just unusually slow.

 

Well what's running when you're shutting it down?

If you have 100000 programs/processes trying to shut down at the same time it might take a while.

 

give us a list of programs installed.

update your bios/firmware and all device drivers.

have a look at the SMART counters in your hard drive for error levels.

do you have sleep/hibernation enabled?

any web browser tool bars or context-menu (right click) 'enhancements' loaded?

 

Do you by any chance use RAMdisk software?

 

I've got under 70 processed running at any given time.
Sleep is enabled
Hibernation is not
No enhancements loaded
I do not use ramdisk software.

I think i'm just going to reformat and do a clean install of windows 7 pro.

 

Could it be that your clearing your pagefile on shutdown? I had installed some software that changed the value in the registry to clear pagefile on shutdown. After words it took a long time to shutdown. It took a lot of investigation to figure out this was the problem.

Here is the support article from Microsoft to turn on clearing. You want the value to be a 0 to turn off clearing the page file.

How to Clear the Windows Paging File at Shutdown

let us know if this is the problem.

 

I set the value to 0, seems to help a little. Thanks for the tip. Does it matter that my paging file size is 0.

 

By default the registry key is set to 0 so that it does not clear the Pagefile when you shut down.

Clearing the Pagefile is supposed to be a security measure that can help protect unencrypted passwords that may make it to the Pagefile. Myself I am pretty careful about security, and I am not worried by it.

The difference of 6 seconds for shutdown versus 30-40 seconds is enough for me to not clear the Pagefile on shutdown.

 

Have oyu checked out the 20X logs in the Event Register as I suggested? You should find there the program that is slowing down your system when it's shuting down.

 

Not sure how to access the event register? However it seems that setting the clear pagefile to 0 has fixed it. It no longer takes a long time to shut down now. Thanks Othonda.

 

Same thing happened to me in win 7 after doing the so called "SSD tweaks". It was one of the registry ones, I think indeed the clean page file, or large cache files or whatever. Return back to normal after reversing the "tweak".

 

This problem was a nasty one to fix, it turns out the event logs are of no use since windows does not think anything is wrong. Glad I could help!