How To Speed Up The Shutdown Of Your Windows

The Windows shutdown process may be as slow as the start up unfortunately. But, due to Windows amazing ability of user managed settings, you can change that! So, how can you speed up your Windows Shutdown process ?

(There have been previous articles – in the WinHack column – on how to Speed Up Windows twice, here and here.)

WARNING : BEFORE making any changes to the Windows registry, it is highly recommended to make a backup in case anything goes wrong. To backup your Windows registry, tap your Windows key on the keyboard and “R”. When the Run box comes up, type regedit. When the Registry box comes up, go to ‘File’ then ‘Export’. Save the resulting file to your hard drive.

Ready for some more tweaking? Let’s go!

Auto-Kill All Programs at Shutdown

This tweak can speed up the process a lot by killing tasks quickly and not requiring user input for closing them, e.g. the repetitive Firefox pop-up asking if you really want to quit. Here it is:

Step 1: Go to “Start,” “Run,” and type regedit.

Step 2: Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop

Step 3: Find the Registry Key called AutoEndTasks and right-click then select Modify. Change the value to 1.

Change Application Hang Time

There are a few Registry Keys that are, by default, set to a ridiculous setting. There are three of them that we are going to cover today called WaitToKillApp, HangAppTime, and WaitToKillServiceTimeout.

WaitToKillApp sets the time for Windows to wait before killing the application you are attempting to close, while HangAppTime sets the hang time for the app before closing, and WaitToKillServiceTimeout sets the time for Windows to wait before killing Microsoft Services.

By shortening these you will, obviously, have a faster application response.

Ready? Let’s do it!

Step 1: Go to “Start,” “Run,” and type regedit.

Step 2: Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop

Step 3: Find the Registry Key labeled WaitToKillApp, HangAppTime, and WaitToKillServiceTimeout and right-click them, then select Modify. Change the value to 1000.

Disable Clearing of Paging File

We previously talked about the paging article in another article on speeding up Windows, but today we are talking about how to speed up the use of the Paging File even more.

On shutdown, Windows automatically removes the contents of the Paging File for security, because it may run as a temporary file, holding information such as unencrypted passwords, etc. (If you believe the security of your system will be too far out of control due to the absence of removal of such information, then it is not necessary that you use this hack.)

Let’s do it!

Step 1: Go to “Start,” “Run,” and type regedit.

Step 2: Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management.

Step 3: Find the Registry Key labeled ClearPageFileOnShutdown and right-click it, then select Modify. Change the value to 0.

Hope this helps you get into your tweaking mood! Have fun hacking tweaking! More next time on WinHack!