Malke's advice is good; perhaps I can add a touch of my own
experience too. I don't fully understand the inter-workings of
all this, but at one point I had a ShutDown time of over 7
minutes and Hibernate took closer to 8 minutes.
Investigating Event Viewer et al didn't show anything in
particular; I think there was one DCOM error, but it was
unrelated to Shut Down timing in the end analysis.
There are a couple of schools of thought, one that says that as
long as everything works, don't worry about how long it takes.
To a degree I can subscribe to that, but boy I was really
dreading anything that might make me have to Restart of Reboot
more than once. Ymmv of course, but here's MY experience:
-- I found, I -think- it was with Event Viewer not positive, two
processes that were hanging for 30 seconds each while they
searched for a global Security something it never found. Killing
those helped my boot time, but did nothing for Restart times.
Do/run:
-- Disk Cleanup
-- Defrag
-- Kill AV, disconnect from internet
-- Run uphclean.exe (see below)
-- Run BootVis (see below)
Between each, do a healthy number of Restarts and a Cold Boot
or two. If I'm going to work on the system, I always start from
a Cold Boot and do a Cold Boot at the end when I think I'm done.
In between I'll usually just use Restarts.
Cold Boot = Shut Down, power off computer with its own power
switch, wait for fans to power down if they're running, then kill
power to the computer completely. Wait at least 30 seconds more,
then start up again.
It guarantees RAM loses all data and nothing functional is
left in RAM to get in the way of anything.
-------------- Process explained ----------------
First of course, do a Disk Cleanup. Start, Programs,
Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup.
Then defrag the boot drive (usually C: of course). It's located
in the same menu as Disk Cleanup was.
-- Someone offered up a hive cleanup utility called
uhpclean.exe, which I tried out. Now, that did help, a LOT. You
can read about it and download it from here:
http://www.castlecops.com/o23list-1774.html
It helped and ShutDown and Startup times were noticeably
improved. It still wasn't back to what it "used to be" though,
so, remembering a utility called BootVis I'd used once before, I
redownloaded it. It's claim to fame is to be able to record the
order of the Registry entries and optimize (not defrag) registry
structure, mostly for startup issues, but I figured it wouldn't
hurt to try it.
You can download it from a zillion places on the 'net - it's
actually a Microsoft utility if you want to get it from there; I
think I got mine from Eldergeeks or one of those types of sites.
I ran BootVis a couple of times, saved the boot logs for
posterity, and then used the Optimize feature under BootVis's
Trace, Optimize System.
After the next reboot, everything was looking MUCH better!
Restarting was fast enough I didn't even bother timing it right
away.
Actually, now I think about it, I ran BootVis Optimize twice in
succession, doing a Cold Start in between runs, feeling very
hopeful from the first results.
Then of course XP seems to do some sort of "healing" of its own
now and then, and things improved again, though barely
noticeably. That was about two and a half weeks ago now and so
far I'm still very happy with startup and shut down times.
To your original question, I do seem to recall one of the sets of
9 at a time MS Updates causing the slowdown but I wasn't sure
they really caused it, nor whether it would have been the last
one or the one before that. I don't think it's important in the
overall scheme of things.
Right now Shut Down is taking about 45 seconds give or take, and
a Cold Boot takes about 2 minutes 20 seconds, give or take and I
havent' measured Hibernate, but it's completely acceptable; they
vary slightly from time to time.
I have 62 processes running and have several apps loaded,
including some pretty heavy cpu/RAM users (Video Editors, Ghost,
things like that).
I think startup could probably benefit from killing a few
uneeded services, but I tend not to fix things that ain't borke
<g>. Yet. Messing with services is a good way to increase the
startup times if you aren't positive of what you're doing: BTDT.
I didn't mention it, but all this assumes the machine is clean of
viruses/trojans and general malware which can also cause such
issues and should be the very first thing one looks into.
One thing that can extend shut down times is accounts not being
let go properly; I think that's what uphclean.exe fixed for me.
Then optimizing the registry with bootvis seems to add the final
touch.
HTH,
Pop
Malke said:
Gary said:
Running WinXP Pro SP2. All of a sudden it's taking over ten
minutes for
the
machine to shut down! I may be wrong but I believe that this
just started
happening after I did the last round of updates from "Windows
Update". I
don't use this machine for much but I thought that maybe
something that I
was doing in one of my apps was causing it. However, I just
booted the
machine up and did a shutdown without opening any other
program. It still
took over ten minutes to shut down. The machine wasn't
connected to a
network or to the internet. I was just wondering if anyone
else had heard
of similar problems with recent updates. I didn't want to go
tearing
things apart looking for a problem only to find out it was
something
caused by an
update. TIA
No problems after updating all our XP machines here, but you
can uninstall
the latest updates and find out for yourself. Go to Add/Remove
Programs and
tick "Show Updates". Uninstall the latest ones and see what
happens. If the
machine returns to normal, install the updates one at a time to
find out
which one is the culprit.
Here's an excellent shutdown troubleshooter:
http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.htm
You should also look in Event Viewer for clues:
Start>Run>eventvwr.msc [enter]
Malke
--
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic"
