How To: Make Your Windows XP Computer Shut Down More Quickly
When’s the last time you didn’t have an application hang on you during shutdown? Windows XP waits a grueling 20 seconds by default before trying to kill services that are still running when you’re trying to get out of the office, but you can knock this down to as low as zero with a quintet of registry hacks.
Make the following changes in Windows XP registry:
- Click on Windows XP Start button and Type regedit in the Run box and hit Enter.
- Under HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop, change the values for WaitToKillAppTimeout and HungAppTimeout to 1000 or 2000 (this is the wait time in milliseconds).
- Under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop, change the values for WaitToKillAppTimeout and HungAppTimeout to 1000 or 2000.
- Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control, change the value for WaitToKillAppTimeout to 1000 or 2000.
- Use the same value for all three settings.
- Reboot your computer .
The key WaitToKillAppTimeout determines how long the system waits for user processes to end after the user attempts to log off or to shut down. When the time specified in this entry expires, the End Task dialog box appears, stating that the process did not respond. So now we need to do some tweak so that end task dialog box will not appear. Right? The key responsible for this is AutoEndTasks.
- Click on Windows XP Start button and Type regedit in the Run box and hit Enter.
- In registry editor Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Control Panel\ Desktop
- Look for AutoEndTasks key in the right pane and double click on it.
- The default value will be 0, change it to 1.
- Click on OK. This will not display the end task dialog box.
Note: Before editing the Windows XP registry, please take a back up of it. It is quite simple and can be done by clicking file > Export in registry editor menu and putting the file name of the backup and clicking on save.
Here are some other important tips to speed up Windows XP shutdown process.
- Don’t have XP clear your paging file at shutdown
For security reasons, you can have XP clear your paging file (pagefile.sys) of its contents whenever you shut down. Your paging file is used to store temporary files and data, but when your system shuts down, information stays in the file. Some people prefer to have the paging file cleared at shutdown because sensitive information, such as unencrypted passwords, sometimes ends up in the file. However, clearing the paging file can slow shutdown times significantly, so if extreme security isn’t a high priority, you might not want to clear it. To shut down XP without clearing your paging file, run the Registry Editor (regedit) and go to:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
Change the value of ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 0. Close the Registry and restart your computer. Whenever you turn off XP from now on, the paging file won’t be cleared, and you should be able to shut down more quickly.
- Turn off unnecessary services
Services take time to shut down, so the fewer you run, the faster you can shut down. Click here to view how to turn off unnecessary services in Windows XP.
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Written by Tony on November 10th, 2008 with
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