Status
Not open for further replies.

thestrangebrew

Distinguished
Apr 30, 2010
335
0
18,790
My stepsons pc won't shut down in xp. I click the start menu, go to shutdown, it does it's thing, hourglass shows up, then after about 2-3 mins, the hourglass disappears, the mouse pointer is back, and I can use my desktop as if nothing happened. I don't get any errors, if I do a manual power off and restart, I get a normal windows boot, no errors or anything.

Specs:

amd 64 4400+
asus a8n 32 sli deluxe
2 gb kvr
8800gt
600w osu

This is my old pc that I've handed down to my stepson so he could play games. I'm going to run antivirus stuff tonight to see if anything comes up. Prior to giving the pc to him, it ran fine for me.
 
Solution
Yeah, in that case, I'd definitely do a clean reinstall. It's going to be much easier than trying to untangle the whole mess working backward.

banthracis

Distinguished
Xp had a lot of issues with shutdown early on, but they should have been mostly resolved.

1. Make sure windows is up to date, IE all updates.
2. Make sure all drivers are up to date.
3. Run some anti virus/adware/spyware programs, could be something preventing your computer from shutting down.
4. You aren't unplugging and USB/firewire devices without stopping it first are you?
 

thestrangebrew

Distinguished
Apr 30, 2010
335
0
18,790
well my stepson charges his ipod on it sometimes. He does have a habit of just unplugging it. But I'm able to close itunes out before trying to shutdown. I'll run avg tonight to see if there's an issue. He's downloaded a few game demos that may be malware or something.

What are some good free adware/spyware/antivirus programs? I'm tired of avg reminding me or recommending me to buy their stuff.
 
D

Deleted member 217926

Guest
I use Avira anti virus. It is free like AVG but is rated better. It does do a single pop-up a day as a form of advertising but that is a small price in my opinion.
Try Malwarebytes http://www.malwarebytes.org/
Spybot Search and Destroy ( I do not turn on the resident protection as I find it intrusive but it is still a great scanner and has other tools ) http://www.safer-networking.org/en/home/index.html
Ccleaner is also a great tool to have http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
It also would not hurt to run Windows Defender.

Hope some of that helps.
 
OK, there are a handful of known bugs where the shutdown process can be slowed/frozen by processes -- the most common I've heard being the Group Policy Editor taking forever to clear the virtual pagefile at shutdown, followed in second place by the Event Log service trying to log a problem happening when a process is ended at shutdown. Also a couple process related to iTunes and Nvidia cards occasionally do this. There's an excellent guide to finding and getting started troubleshooting them here (look half to 2/3 of the way down):

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.php

Honestly though, sometimes this just happens because the machine is old and your copy of Windows is all crapped up. By which I mean, over time, any computer is going to build up a nice steaming pile of things that slow down the operating system -- bad registry entries, uninstalled programs that left behind traces, system files that got moved or modified, useless processes that run in the background and chew up resources unbeknownst to you ... things like that.

It's basically unavoidable, and there's really no way to fix it all, short of doing a clean reinstall of Windows. If you don't want to do that, you can likely regain some speed back by doing a few things:

- Run a hard drive defrag if you haven't recently
- Look for any unnecessary applications that automatically run at startup, and disable them from the control panel
- Run a *good* registry cleaner (you can find a lot of good recommendations/downloads at majorgeeks.com. I would not try running an automated registry cleaner on Vista or above; they seem to do more harm than good. But for XP they still seem to help)

If it's still going slowly ... it is possible to initiate the shutdown process without having to click and wait for the menu to pop up. Just open the Run menu and type, "shutdown -s -t 5" (without the quotes) and it will begin the shutdown process. (in case you're wondering, the -s tells it to shut down and not restart, whereas -r would tell it to restart ... the -t and the number following it specify how long to wait until shutting down; in this case it would be 5 seconds but you can make it whatever you want.)

Anyway, I've found that extremely helpful for one of my older machines that was taking several minutes to display the shutdown menu. That lets me just set it and walk away, which I cannot tell you how much frustration it saves.
 

thestrangebrew

Distinguished
Apr 30, 2010
335
0
18,790
Cool thanks for the info. I did do a clean install before I gave the pc to my stepson, so I don't think that it's all buggered up. I just think my stepson, not knowing any better, found some free trial games, downloaded them and borked it all up to hell. He doesn't have much on there as it is right now since he's only been using it for a month (exclusively for games and internet) so there isn't anything on there that he can't stand to lose.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.