Entropy

There are various articles around about increasing the speed of your Windows shut down; I know (from personal experience) that sometimes Vista/XP can take several long minutes to shut down. Inspired by LifeHacker I searched for more information on some of the ones I know of, and have put what I consider to be the best speed-up tips below.

Application Kill Timeouts

If you’ve played around in a non-windows environment you’ll probably know about kill; if not a kill is a signal sent to a program which instructs it to either reload its configuration or exit. There are various levels, and specific kills can simply stop the process midway and effectively “kill” it off.

When you shut down, Windows sends a kill message to all the processes running - but its a polite one, asking them to stop what they are doing, make any saves they need and exit. If they don’t it has a timeout after which it sends a mean kill, and ends the process.

CNET’s tip is to reduce this wait period by modifying the registry timeout values. This can increase your shutdown speed dramatically as they suggest waiting a max of 1 second per application as opposed to the default 5 seconds (5x longer).

For more information on how to do that, please check CNET’s guide.

Profile Unloading

“When you run programs and open files on your computer, they create connections to the Windows Registry (a store of settings). If the application closes without releasing the open registry handle, it leads to problems when you are logging off the computer or even rebooting.”

UPHClean (a free MS download) can check for these problems and releases the connections sooner rather than later.

“The problem becomes more severe if your roaming profile is stored on a server”.

To learn more about UPHClean please see Labnol’s guide.

Panic Shutdown

If for some unknown reason you need to shut down in a real hurry, Daily Apps has a nice command which will shut your machine down in the blink of an eye. Of course this has its down sides, like it doesn’t give any applications time to exit properly - make sure you’ve saved everything to disk.

The trick is running the following  command: “shutdown -f -t 0“. This instructs the machine to shut down immediately, killing any applications that are running. I imagine you could even have a desktop shortcut to execute this in a time of crisis..

For more about this please see Daily Apps.

Page File

A page file is essentially a file on your system that’s used as RAM when you’ve run out. That means that it takes up a portion of your hard drive space, and the OS controls whats in it etc during  your usage of your machine. When you shut down, this file is emptied - mostly for security reasons. You see it could contain data which programs think will be lost due to RAM not storing anything - decrypted information, passwords; who knows.

If you aren’t paranoid then I don’t believe it to be a concern - its very unlikely (to me) that this would be the gaping hole your Windows machine gets exploited through. It requires access to the file; requires that you have something on your machine that is not accessible if someone just booted it up and I’m sure there are easier ways.

To stop the clearing of your page file on shut down; follow these steps –

1. Start Regedit.
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
3. Select ClearPageFileAtShutdown from the list on the right.
4. Right click on it and select Modify.
5. Change the value to 1 to enable.
6. Reboot your computer.

For more information on this please see the Astahost forums.