Win 2K Extremely Show on Shut Down

[ssimak]

Hello,

I am running Windows 2000 Professional on a Dell Precision Workstation 210. When I shut the machine down, the PC hangs on the "Saving Data" message for quite a long time (but the hard drive is not saving anything). It eventually shuts down okay.

Are there any settings I can check/adjust to improve the shut down time.

Thanks.

Steve

 

[elzt]

Perhaps more details of your system would help us to sort out the problem?

Is your PC connected to a network? Any anti-virus software installed? Any service pack applied to Win2000? Did the problem happen just recently or since day 1 you ran Win2000?

I read somewhere (not sure if the source is trustworthy) that uninstalling Windows security update Q329170 and Q328310 might help. Anyway, backup important data and have the installation discs of Windows and other softwares handy if you want to try it out.

 

[Teq]

I've seen this from time to time. It's usually about incomplete tasks and data not written to hard disk yet. Sometimes it's because a program is running in the background (and Win2k is loaded with background services, 2/3 of which can be safely turned off).

Get a copy of StarupCPL (<A HREF="http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml" target="_new">http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml</A>) and look in each of the tabs... see if any hidden programs are being loaded at starup. Uncheck everything you don't need and see what happens.

Sometimes it's got to do with the swap file...

Go into your system properties/performance and set both the maximum and minimum swap files to the same size, this will disable swap file maintenance done at shutdown. The value is kind of a guess... On 128meg of ram, 512meg swap files are generally about right; 256megs, 256megs... on 1024, you might be able to set it to the minimum (8megs).

If you are comfortable in REGEDIT, find your way into:
HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Memory Management and be sure the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value is set to 0

Also if you have SP3 installed, go into your Control Panel/Administrative tools/Services and find the "Background Intellegent Transfers" service and disable it. Same with "Automatic Updates". Both of these will hold your system on until they complete.

More information about windows services can be found here:
<A HREF="http://snakefoot.fateback.com/tweak/winnt/services.html" target="_new">http://snakefoot.fateback.com/tweak/winnt/services.html</A>

Hope this helps...


<b>(</b>It ain't better if it don't work.<b>)</b>

 

[ssimak]

Thanks for the replies. A few people have mentioned hotfix Q329170 as the possible culprit. I might try removing it from Add/Remove programs panel.

This machine is not on a network. I am up to SP 3. Norton is on it (but not active - I only use it to scan the disk once a week). This is a more recent development. After a clean install it shut down fine, then after a few months it would be intermittant, now it's slow all the time.

I will take a look at all the options mentioned. Thanks again to everyone for your help.

Steve