Make Windows Shut Down Faster

In general you need a fair amount of patience when you shut down windows. Closing windows and waiting for windows to shut down can take a long time. The only situation where windows shuts down fast, is after a fresh installation. Since most of us do not have time to reinstall windows every month, this is not a viable option. So it would be better if we have a way to speed up windows XP shutdown.

There are a few things we can do to make windows shut down faster. One of these options is to stop windows from waiting on closing applications. When an application has problems closing down, windows waits for a fair amount of time to allow the application to terminate itself. If you do not want this delay, you can change the time windows waits for ending applications during shutdown.

1. Start the Registry Editor. From the Windows Start menu, select Run and in the Run box, type regedit and click OK.
2. In the Registry Editor,locate the following registry key in the left-hand tree view:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop.
3. Select and double-click the AutoEndTask entry and change the value into 1.
4. Next, locate the following registry key in the left-hand tree view:
   LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
5. Select and double-click the WaitToKillServiceTimeOut entry and change the value into 1000.
6. Finally, close the Registry Editor. Press Alt+F4 or select Exit in the File menu.

Windows will now force a program to terminate when it does not close within 1 second during a computer shutdown. So this is one way to tweak Windows XP to speed up Windows XP shutdown.

Note: Please keep in mind that not all applications handle a forced close equally well. If you have an application that needs to be closed properly, it is best to manually close them before you shut down your PC.